Microdata Methods and Practice

supported by the EU 6th Research Framework and Marie Curie Research Training Actions

Meetings

The Network plans seven conferences that will allow trainees to present their work and interact with senior researchers in formulating further research plans. The meetings also allow the scientific committee to monitor the progress of the various teams in meeting their goals and the quality of their interaction in the training programme and in promoting the main themes of the network. Meetings will also be used in order to involve researchers from outside the Network in the workings of the group, bringing in fresh ideas and helping to recruit young researchers.

Policy Evaluation Methods

How can one evaluate whether a government labour market programme such as the New Deal, or a subsidy to education such as the EMA is actually working? This course deals with the econometric and statistical tools that have been developed to estimate the causal impact on one or more outcomes of interest of any generic 'intervention' in the presence of selection decisions by agents - from government programmes, policies or reforms, to the returns to education, the impact of unionism on wages, or of migration on the labour market. After highlighting the 'evaluation problem' and the challenges it poses to the analyst, we focus on the empirical methods to solve it.

For each of these approaches, we give the basic intuition, discuss the assumptions needed for its validity, highlight the question it answers, discuss its strengths and weaknesses drawing from example applications in the literature and implement it 'hands-on' in practical Stata sessions.

Level of knowledge required: Basic econometric / statistical knowledge including a working knowledge of OLS regression. The practical part of the course will make use of Stata; although the exercises will be guided, basic familiarity with this software is recommendable.

Speakers