Empirical Strategies in Economics

Description

The 2021 Nobel prize in Economics was awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens for their contributions involving the analysis of natural experiments. Many of the big questions in Economics as in other disciplines are causal questions: How does one more year of education affect someone's future income? However, randomized controlled trials are often not feasible to answer these questions. Randomizing the amount of education someone receives is not possible for legal and ethical reasons. Card, Angrist, and Imbens have shown that it is still possible to answer such cause-and-effect questions using natural experiments. The key idea is to use chance events, institutional rules or policy changes that create situations in which people are treated differently, much like in a controlled trial that randomly assigns people to different treatments. The course is based on the textbook "Mastering 'Metrics" by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke (2015) as well as the online course by Joshua Angrist available at mru.org/mastering-econometrics.

Target Group and Prerequisites

The course is designed for advanced Bachelor students in Economics and Business (around the 5th study semester). Students should have taken Basic Economics (Grundlagen der Makroökonomie, Grundlagen der Mikroökonomie) and Basic Quantitative Methods (Wirtschaftsmathematik, Einführung in die Statistische Datenanalyse, Stichprobenbasierte Datenanalyse), or equivalent courses before.

Assessment

The assessment is based on an exam and a paper presentation, both in January 2026. The module can only be passed if both the exam and the paper presentation are passed.

Schedule

Lectures: Tuesdays, Oct 14, 2025 - Jan 13, 2026, 10:15-11:45, lecture room S05, 

Exam: Tuesday, Jan 20, 2026, 10-11, S 05

Workshop: Tuesday, Jan 27, 2026, from 10 o'clock