Applied Microeconomics II

Catalog description

The course uses examples from the fields of labor, development, and public economics in order to illustrate econometric methods employed in model-based estimation, in which an explicit model of agents’ decisions is the basis for the estimation of policy-invariant parameters. These estimates can then be used to perform (numerical) comparative statics exercises and counterfactual policy experiments. In addition to discussing the substantive details of each of the papers that we consider, we will present details of the econometric procedures utilized. In particular, the course discusses maximum likelihood estimation, nonlinear least squares, and the method of simulated moments.