Causal inference and policy evaluation

Does offering financial incentives to students boost their academic performance? How does military service affect long-term income and what do draft lotteries have to do with it? Do students who just qualify for financial aid perform better in college than those who just miss out? Do anti-corruption audits reduce misuse of public funds in municipalities? Do parental leave policies improve female labor force participation? Do historical institutions affect present-day economic growth? Would you like to know how to answer these questions in a rigorous way? Causal Inference and Policy Evaluation will teach you methods to uncover cause-and-effect relationships in economics using data - moving beyond correlations to identify credible impacts of policies, institutions, and behaviors.

This course introduces students to core empirical strategies used in modern applied economics: randomized controlled trials, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences-in-differences. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with a toolkit to critically assess empirical claims and begin conducting their own research using credible causal methods, to read and understand the specialized literature using causal inference, and to broadly communicate results of causal evaluations.