Professor Alan Manning and Dr Thomas Sampson

This course is a compulsory second year course for the MPA Public and Economic Policy and is also available as an option for other MPA students. It is also available as an option to other graduate students that have a suitable background with the permission of the course lecturer. This course is a controlled access course.

The aim of this course is to reinforce the ability of students to use statistics and economics to evaluate policy questions. In many ways the course builds on the material covered in Quantitative Approaches and Policy Analysis (EC455) and Micro and Macroeconomics for Public Policy (EC440) and covers similar questions but at greater depth.

At the beginning of the first term the course covers the key techniques to evaluate policy in more detail than in EC455. After this review of key regression techniques, the course covers a wide range of current public policy issues. Each lecture typically gives a brief introduction to a policy issue and then considers one or two recent empirical papers on this question in detail and draws out policy implications.

40 hours lectures and 20 hours classes sessional.

Students will complete additional exercises, which will be marked, as formative assessment.

There is no single textbook for the course. James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson "Introduction to Econometrics", remains a very useful reference. A substantially more advanced reference for background reading is Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke "Mostly Harmless Econometrics". A full reading list with the readings for each topic will be made available at the beginning of the course.

A three-hour written examination in ST.