HMET4220 – Applied Micro Econometrics

Schedule, syllabus and examination date

Course content

The course will provide students with a theoretical background and practical experience in different methods to estimate effects of health interventions or policy interventions. Students will also learn how to design interventions and conduct experiments to measure causal effects. Special emphasis will be placed on the distinction between estimating treatment effects based on experimental data versus observational data, and how to deal with selection and information bias in observational data

Learning outcome

Knowledge

You will gain knowledge of:

  • The difference between causation and correlation
  • Different concepts of causation Concept of selection bias and its causes
  • Advantages and disadvantages of using experiments
  • Advantages and disadvantages of different methods that control for selection bias
  • The potential outcome framework and instrumental variables
  • General approaches to identify causal effects in observational data
  • Knowledge of assumptions behind different approaches to the identification of effects

Skills

You will learn:

  • How to design a randomized controlled experiment
  • How to use propensity score matching methods and synthetic control to analyze observational data
  • How to instrumental variables, regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference methods to identify causal effects
  • Ability to identify when the different methods for causal analysis are most appropriate
  • Draw a directed acyclic graph of causal relationships and discuss how the structure of the graph enables or makes it difficult to identify a causal effect

General competence

You will gain:

  • Increased awareness of the possibilities and limits of scientific knowledge
  • Increased understanding of ethical problems in experiments

Admission to the course

This course is only available for students at the following master programmes:

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for