PAM 6090 - Empirical Strategies for Policy Analysis

(crosslisted) ECON 6590

Fall. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: graduate course in econometrics (e.g., ILRLE 7490 or AEM 7100).

D. Miller.

Focuses on empirical strategies to identify the causal effects of public policies and programs. The course uses problem sets based on real-world examples and data to examine techniques for analyzing nonexperimental data including control function approaches, matching methods, panel-data methods, selection models, instrumental variables, and regression-discontinuity methods. The emphasis throughout, however, is on the critical role of research design in facilitating credible causal inference. The course aids students in both learning to implement a variety of statistical tools using large data sets, and in learning to select which tools are best suited to a given research project.