A core text for courses in Financial Research Methods or Financial Statistics, and a reference to be used throughout an entire graduate or undergraduate financial program.

Unique in both content and approach, this text/reference provides a welcome solution to a problem all to often encountered by finance students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels: they take a statistics course, leave the class thinking they know statistics, but when asked to carry out the methodology in a research setting, they invariably cannot. Unlike other financial statistics texts (which simply explain how a procedure should be done), this text focuses on key financial procedures and breaks them down to a level truly accessible to students by showing them in detail what to do at each step in the procedure-much like following a recipe in a cookbook. And, because raw financial datasets are used, each method is related directly to finance and to the specific problems financial data presents. Students also become adept at using statistical procedures related exclusively to finance (often tersely described only in academic journals).