Economic Program Evaluation

Catalog description

Does increasing the minimum wage reduce employment? Do smaller class sizes improve students' achievement? Does Medicare improve its recipients' health status? Program evaluation is an essential part of policy making and the political debate. More generally, causality and the identification of causal effects are at the heart of many questions in economics. The goal of this class is to give students a precise understanding of what causality is, and a working knowledge of empirical methods used in economics to estimate causal effects and evaluate public policy. Recommended: ECON 2310 .