PP455E Half Unit
Empirical Methods for Public Policy
This information is for the 2018/19 session.
Teacher responsible
Dr Daniel Sturm and Dr Gregory Fischer
Availability
This course is compulsory on the Executive Master of Public Administration and Executive Master of Public Policy. This course is not available as an outside option.
Pre-requisites
There are no formal pre-requisites, but recommended advance readings will be distributed ahead of the course. Familiarity with the material covered in the EMPA/ EMPP Mathematics and Statistics Refresher module is assumed.
Course content
The course introduces students to the quantitative evaluation of public policies. The focus of the course is on practical applications of techniques to test the effectiveness of public policy interventions. The course begins with an overview over the key benefits of randomized experiments in the evaluation of public policies. Next the course covers a number of techniques that are widely used in the evaluation of public policies, including difference-in-differences regressions, regression discontinuity approaches and matching. It concludes with an introduction to cost-benefit analysis.
Teaching