ECONOMETRICS ANALYSIS OF DEVELOPMENT POLICIES

Learning objectives
By the end of the course students will be equipped with the necessary methodological skills required to understand published empirical papers in development studies/economics. Through their assignments they will have developed the ability to conduct empirical research using a variety of impact evaluation methods and time-series econometric techniques. Overall, at the end of the course students should have developed the skills needed to conceive, organize, conduct and present empirical research.

Course description
Each year several students find that the methodological tools at their command often falls short of the problems that they would like to analyse. This shortcoming sometimes hampers their ability to read and understand empirical papers in professional journals and restricts their ability to carry out a more sophisticated analysis of the research issues that they have chosen to tackle. The aim of this course is to pre-empt such problems.
The course is divided into two sections. The first part of the course will deal with the concepts and methods of impact evaluation in the social sciences. This part of the course begins with a review of the evaluation problem and then discusses various non-experimental (regression discontinuity design, difference-in-differences, propensity score matching) and experimental (randomized control trials) methods that may be used to evaluate the outcomes of various interventions. The course builds on the material covered in ISS-3203, especially the discussion of sample selection correction and instrumental variables.
The final part of the course builds upon the time-series lectures in ISS-3203 and covers a number of time series techniques that are frequently applied to the dynamic modelling of relationships between macroeconomic variables as well as the short- and long-run behaviour of individual macro-variables.