This course is designed to introduce you to - and strengthen your knowledge of - the empirical methods used in applied microeconomics. More narrowly, the focus will be on the methods used in program evaluation; that is, to estimate the effect of some variable X on some variable Y. You may have seen these methods before, but it is important that you understand exactly what are their strengths and weaknesses, how they are related and how you should use them.
With that in mind, the course will involve three components:
Ideally, a student taking this class will have (a) a sound grasp of econometrics at the undergraduate level (i.e., solid performance on an upper-division undergraduate econometrics course) (b) a reasonable grasp of econometrics at the graduate level (i.e., exposure to some graduate courses) and (c) a research question that they would like to address using one or more of the methods taught in the course. In practice, one of (b) and (c) might suffice: a student that is sufficiently motivated can work on the technical side of things as the course progresses; a technically minded student can use the course to help think about research questions. There is no way around (a): a student that does not have a solid grasp of undergraduate-level econometrics will get little out of this course.
Note that ECON 245 is a pre-requisite for another graduate applied econometrics courses that I teach. This course - ECON 249: Advanced Methods for Applied Microeconomics - is likely to be offered in 2024-2025. It is taught in a similar style to ECON 245 but is less comprehensive in scope. Instead, I focus more deeply on a limited number of topics, include a review of some non-linear models, further topics related to instrumental variables and an introduction to structural models.