PUBPOL 6090

Empirical Strategies for Policy Analysis

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

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.

When Offered Fall.

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

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