Date: April 26, 2013 , 09:00 – 17:00, IAB Nuremberg
Institution: Graduate Programme (GradAB) at the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nuremberg
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Johannes Schmider (Boston University)
This course provides an overview over research methods for evaluating economic policies. The course will cover Difference in Difference, Randomized Experiments, Bunching estimators, Regression Discontinuity Designs and Regression Kink Designs. The focus will be on the practical aspects of these methods, their strength and weaknesses and how they can be used to inform policy makers. We will cover many current edge research papers, in particular drawing on examples from evaluating the effects of transfer programs, such as welfare benefits and earned income tax credits, and social insurance programs such as unemployment benefits. The emphasis will be on “reduced form estimators” based on natural experiments – as opposed to structural estimation of fully specified models. However we will show how these methods can be used in combination with theory to estimate parameters for evaluating the welfare effects of economic benefits along the lines of the sufficient statistics approach that has become popular in the applied public finance literature in recent years (See Chetty 2009).
Please register by E-mail sandra.huber@iab.de