ECON417

Prerequisite: 1 course with a minimum grade of C- from (ECON306, ECON326) and 1 course with a minimum grade of C- from (ECON424, ECON422). Restriction: Must be in Economics Bachelor of Arts program. Governments, businesses, non-profits, funders, and other organizations must allocate scarce resources between competing uses. Understanding the causal effect of policies, programs or investments on key outcomes can guide the choices of these decision-makers. Correlations between policies and outcomes or changes in outcomes after new policies are adopted are rarely sufficient for estimating the causal effect, however. This course focuses on econometric strategies for obtaining unbiased causal estimates, including experimental methods, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and differences-in-differences. There will be an emphasis on using Stata and on interpreting the results of econometric analysis