Slow economic growth in many parts of the world has led to development aid pessimism. While some believe aid in general does not work and argue that development cannot be planned others think that in fact aid was simply not significant enough to be successful. Hence the former argue in favour of smaller steps and to build on what works, while the latter ask for a substantial increase of aid. This debate has raised the interest in and need of rigorous policy and project evaluations which can in a credible way establish a link between cause and effect. This course introduces students to the concept and various methods of experimental and quasi experimental impact evaluations. All methods are presented using real world examples. Hence policies and projects are discussed in conjunction with the methods that can be used to evaluate them. Examples include conditional cash transfer programs, the implementation of health insurance, unemployment insurance and a school construction programme among many others.

The methods that are discussed in this course are similar to those used in OECD countries to evaluate for example active labour market policies and social security reforms. Hence, the course is not only of interest for students with a special interest in development, but for all students that aim to get experience in policy evaluation more generally.

The course is accompanied by a tutorial in which students acquire hands-on experience on how to assess impacts using real data and an econometric software package, STATA. The first few lessons help students to get acquainted with STATA, the leading statistical software package in economics and other social sciences.