Applied Microeconometric Techniques

Course goals

Learning objectives
At the end of the course the student is able to:

• Understand the difference between correlation and causation
• Develop strategies for identifying causal relationships for questions in business and economics
• Assess the validity of empirical studies on cause-effect relationships
• Apply microeconometric methods to identify causal effects in R
• Interpret and evaluate the results from microeconometric methods
• Explain such evaluations in laymen’s terms

Content

Many questions in business and economics focus on cause-effect relationships: What is the effect on prices on sales? How do marketing campaigns affect sales? How do business strategies affect returns? How to active labor market policies affect participants? How does trade with China affect the Dutch labor market? How does the introduction of robots affect firms’ productivity? Whereas natural sciences can use experiments to uncover causal relationships, this is infeasible for many problems in business and economics. This course provides the essential tools to uncover cause and effect in applied microeconometrics research when randomized experiments are infeasible.
The course covers the following topics:

• Randomization
• Regression
• Instrumental variables
• Regression discontinuity designs
• Differences-in-differences

These tools can be applied to various questions in business, economics and other disciplines.
During this course, students actively learn how to design and assess causal identification strategies, how to apply the methods in the statistical software R, and how to interpret and evaluate the results of these analyses. Students are expected to have the knowledge from the “Introduction to R” course. The course has a strong focus on designing and assessing identification strategies, as well as on actively applying these methods in R. Students gain hands-on experience in both, discussing the validity of identification strategies as well as in applying the methods.

The course is open only for students of the USE Bachelor in Economics and Business Economics and Math Students.
 
Effort requirements
Active participation in at least 6 out of the 8 tutorials.

In case online access is required for this course and you are unable (or do not want) to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.