Advanced Seminar Economics, Policy & Economectrics: Quantitative Economic Research

'This modul prepares students for empirical research (e.g. for their Master's Thesis). We discuss the following topics: 1. Main Concepts in Econometrics and Asymptotic Analysis 2. Estimators for cross-sectional data, repeated cross-sections, and panel-data 3. Interpretation and limitation of estimators

At the end of this seminar, students will be able to - understand empirical economic papers and the application of econometric methods such as OLS, 2SLS, Diff-In-Diff, Double-Machine-Learning - understand the technical conditions and assumptions of these models - assess the limitations of these approaches in real applications - interpret the econometric results in a meaningful way

Seminar paper (50% of final grade; approx. 10 pages): students learn to read and understand empirical research, understand econometric methods that were used, their assumptions and limitations, replicate empirical results using a statistical programming language, and interpret the results; Presentation (50% of final grade; approx. 15 minutes presentation plus participation in the discussions during the seminar): students learn to explain sophisticated research methods and present own empirical results in front of others;

The prerequisite courses include Empirical Research Methods or equivalent.

The module consists of lectures and integrated exercises. The lectures review the most important econometric methods that students learned in previous courses. The exercises contain an introduction into the statistical package R and students learn how to apply econometric methods on replication data.