Lecture Notes on Applied Microeconometrics

This new academic year sees a couple of changes in the courses offered to PhD students of economics at LSE. One of such changes is a new course EC524: Empirical Methods in Applied Economics. This course aims to bridge the gap between pure econometrics and empirical economic research. It's often the case that what you learn in a standard econometrics course is not enough to do empirical research in applied fields (labor economics, development economics, etc). You often find that what econometric researchers - those developing estimation techniques by using statistical theories - say in their econometrics lectures is different from the consensus among empirical researchers - those analysing economic data by using the estimation techniques - in applied fields. Such differences can be learned by reading empirical papers on your own, through research guidance by your supervisor, or from comments to your seminar presentation on your work.

Obviously this is not the most efficient way to learn. Hence this course. I think this kind of course is very rare even amont US top schools. Luckily, the lecture notes of the first part of the course - nonstructural identification lectured by labour economist Professor Steve Pischke - are accessible to anyone. If you're interested, check them out. It's very useful to anyone conducting microeconomic empirical analysis, especially program evaluation.