Course overview
This course deepens the critical thinking and practical reasoning of economics applied to the formal impact evaluation of economic and public policy. This course builds on students’ knowledge of economic theory and econometrics and broadens the scope of policy evaluation to quantitative methodologies and mixed methods. It has a strong focus on applications and case studies. Particular attention is paid to the practical implementation of econometric methods. Students will use economic tools to implement an impact evaluation including designing, selecting, and implementing appropriate methods, and ultimately communicating the results to policy-makers. Case studies and empirical examples will be discussed, providing a framework for the issues students will research and address in their reports.
- Why Evaluate Public Policy and how?
- Causal Inference, Counterfactuals and basic evaluation methods
- Advanced Impact Evaluation Methods
Course learning outcomes
- Apply economic theory and empirical applications to conduct impact evaluations.
- Develop a theory of change linking policy interventions to expected outcomes and define corresponding evaluation questions.
- Apply economic concepts to analyse existing impact evaluations of public policy.
- Evaluate the impact of policy interventions in a broad real-world policy context using appropriate methodologies
- Evaluate outcomes of statistical techniques used for policy evaluation.
- Communicate knowledge of economic policy and related social issues using written, verbal and visual expression.
- Conduct evaluations using specialised statistical software.