Economics 696F: Causal Inference and Program Evaluation

Note: No Class on Friday, April 20
Lectures: Fridays, 12:30-3:00 pm, McClelland 401KK
Office Hours: Fridays, 3:00-4:00 pm, or by appt

Course Description:
This is a Ph.D. level topics course in causal inference and program evaluation methodology. We will focus on using the potential outcomes approach as a general organizing principle, and examine identification and estimation of treatment effects under various types of assumptions. A key theme is to show that certain treatment effects are identified under weak distributional assumptions (nonparametric identification), and then examine a range of estimation methods that incorporate additional "smoothing" assumptions.

Special Lecture:
There will be a special joint lecture on Monday, Feb 5, from 5:30 - 8:00 pm. This lecture will be jointly conducted with Economics 696A, Professor Dufwenberg's course on experimental economics, and will discuss statistical methods for evaluating laboratory experiments.

Handouts

Syllabus (PDF) (updated 03/4/07)
Lecture Note 1
Lecture Note 2
Lecture Note 3
Lecture Note 4
Lecture Note 5 (for special joint meeting with 696A)
Lecture Note 6
Lecture Note 7
Lecture Note 8
Lecture Note 9
Lecture Note 10 (revised 3/9/07)
Lecture Note 11 (revised 3/9/07)
Lecture Note 12
Lecture Note 13 (revised 3/30/07)
Lecture Note 14
Lecture Note 15

Handouts

Homeworks

Other links