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 'treatment' - from government programmes, policies or reforms, to the returns to education, the impact of unionism on wages, or of smoking on own and children's health.

This is a free workshop presented by Ken Wolpin (University of Pennsylvania).

This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentives schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 50,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment one provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment two to teachers only and treatment three gives both individual and group incentives to students, teachers and school administrators. Program impact estimates reveal the largest average effects for treatment three, smaller impacts for treatment one and no impact for treatment two.

This is a free PEPA workshop organised by Monica Costa Dias (IFS), Marcos Vera-Hernandez (UCL) and Richard Blundell (IFS and UCL) .

Confirmed participants:
Orazio Attanasio (UCL and IFS)
Gharad Bryan (LSE)
Pierre Dubois (Toulouse)"Intrahousehold Risk Sharing, Incentives and Nutrition: Evidence from the Philippines"
Greg Fischer (LSE)
Cynthia Kinnan (Northwestern) "The miracle of microfinance? Evidence from a randomized evaluation”
Michael Kremer (Harvard) "Worms at work"
Ethan Ligon (California)"Structural experimentation to distinguish between different models of risk-sharing"
Costas Meghir (Yale) "The Design and Impact of Early Childhood Interventions: Results from Colombia"
Alessandro Tarozzi (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) "Micro-loans, Insecticide-Treated Bednets and Malaria: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Orissa (India)"
Petra Todd (Pennsylvania)
Marcos Vera-Hernandez (UCL) "Social Interactions, Network Size, and Risk Sharing"
Ken Wolpin (Pennsylvania)"Estimating a Coordination Game in the Classroom: Understanding the Low Mathematics Performance of Mexican High School Students”

Further paper titles to be confirmed

Click here to view paper titles and abstracts

This is a PEPA masterclass presented by Petra Todd (University of Pennsylvania).

This course will examine econometric methods for evaluating effects of program interventions. Typical interventions that might be of interest include job training or other active labor market programs, education programs (such as school subsidy programs), or health programs.

The first part of the course will consider methods for ex ante evaluation, that is, methods for evaluating programs that do not yet exist or for evaluating alternative versions of existing programs. These methods usually specify and estimate behavioral models and use the models in assessing the effects of alternative programs or policies. The course will also examine a variety of methods for ex post evaluation that are applicable after the program has been implemented when data are available on persons who participated in some program and on people who did not participate in the program. These methods include random assignment, regression estimators, control function estimators, matching estimators, instrumental-variables based methods, regression-discontinuity approaches, bounding methods and quantile estimators. We will consider the behavioral assumptions needed to justify various approaches and the different parameters that can be identified.

It is helpful preparation for this course to have some background in nonparametric estimation (such as kernel density and kernel or local linear regression approaches), but we will spend some time reviewing these topics.