Statistical Foundations of Econometric Modelling

Rating:
Summary: Depends on what you do with it
Review: I bought this book upon recommendation of my professor, expecting to be able to review what was being dealt with in the lecture. This book is clearly very inappropriate for that. If you happen to already know the concepts involved in the book, you might at times feel good, having recognised something. But you'll rather not learn anything new, at least not by reading it on your own without some guidance. Thus, don't be misguided by the back of the book: it is not intuitive!
On the other hand, Spanos is fighting some philosophical (sic, he states it himself) war about the best way to tackle methodological issues in econometrics. I was admittedly unable to grasp what he was unsatisfied about, but for those interested in these kinds of questions this volume might have something to offer.

Rating:
Summary: A Different Perspective in Econometrics
Review: Spanos describes a different way of doing econometrics refocusing on the statistical properties of the data we are trying to investigate. Clearly stating and testing the statistical assumptions of any econometric model is central in his approach. A really good book.

Rating:
Summary: very thorough, but at times sloppy with notation
Review: Spanos does a good job integrating mathematical theory with the nuts-and-bolts stuff you'd expect from a standard econometrics text. Some have said that Spanos uses too much mathematical notation, but I found just the opposite: many of the passages suffer from ambiguities and outright errors; a more formal treatment would have improved the text considerably.