Kurs bilgisi

Lecturers: Astrid Cullmann, Marco Schmandt
Time: Fridays, 10h-12h
Room: MAR 0.007

Registration via email to m.schmandt@tu-berlin.de or a.cullmann@tu-berlin.de until April 25, 2024.

The goal of this seminar is that you become familiar with all the stages that are required to conduct your own research project in applied econometrics. You will learn how to use state-of-the-art econometric methods to answer relevant research questions in environmental economics. This includes: reading and understanding the relevant literature (including the methodological literature) and conducting your own empirical analysis using statistical software and real-world data.

In this semester, the methodological focus will be on the recent difference-in-differences (DiD) literature.
The first block of the seminar consists of 5 seminar sessions in the first weeks of the semester. First, we will review the canonical DiD method. Second, we discuss recent advances in the DID literature, by reading methodological papers that summarize the advances that have been made in recent years. Third, we read some empirical papers using DiD in environmental econometrics and discuss in how far these papers could be enhanced using novel methods from the econometrics literature.
The second block of the seminar consists of writing a short paper (not more than 10-15 pages). In the paper students should use DiD (or another method like Regression Discontinuity Design or instrumental variables) to answer a research question from environmental economics or related fields. Students are asked to present their research paper ideas in a short presentation (15-20 minutes) at the end of the semester. We will provide data sets that can be used to work on the empirical project.

Prior knowledge in statistics and econometrics is required. Knowledge of some statistical software (STATA, R, or Python) is of advantage but not mandatory.