Evaluating policies II

Materials for class on Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Contents

Slides

Download the slides from today’s lecture.

Helpful causal inference resources

• Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: accessible introduction and overview of DAGs and causal diagrams
• Scott Cunningham, “Causal Inference: The Mixtape”: practical tutorials of all the major econometrics approaches (DAGs, RCTs, natural experiments, regression discontinuity, synthetic controls, etc.). Includes Stata code—will eventually have R code too.
• Daggity: Draw DAGs online and handle pathway analysis semi-automatically
• ggdag: R package for drawing DAGs
• Nick Huntington’s Econ 305 class (code on GitHub): Excellent overviews of causal digrams and main econometric models starting in lectures 13–26
• Causal diagrams cheat sheet
• Daggity cheat sheet

Clearest and muddiest things

Go to this form and answer these three questions:

1. What was the muddiest thing from class today? What are you still wondering about?
2. What was the clearest thing from class today?
3. What was the most exciting thing you learned?

I’ll compile the questions and send out answers after class.