Prerequisites: The course has no formal pre-requesits but a familiarity with basic statistical concepts and calculus is very useful. It is recommended though not necessary to take other courses covering econometrics in parallel. Course description: The aim of the course is to change students' perceptions of the world and causal claims that are made by others around us every single day. To do this, the course will introduce students to the quantitative evaluation of public policies using regression based evaluation methods. In order to build the required intuition and tools, the first section of the course will provide students with a short primer in regression analysis, including a short introduction to Stata. We will then subsequently discuss various strategies to potentially overcome omitted variable biases and other forms of endogeneity, with a particular focus on panel data econometrics. Throughout, the focus of the course will rest on identifying strategies that allow for causal interpretation rather than mathematical derivations of theoretical results. Econometric challenges will always be discussed in close reference to real-world policy questions and the relevant literature. The course will be assessed through a single 90-minute exam but students are also required to prepare weekly exercises, which will include the presentation and discussion of journal articles. Max. number of participants: 20 Registration: in class within 3 weeks after the first class |
