An introduction to impact assessment

On 6 March 2014 from 09:00 to 17:00

Institute for Fiscal Studies

7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE

Participants who are involved in designing policy experiments, managing projects undertaking evaluation, or need to make decisions based on the estimated impact of policies will find this course particularly useful.

The course will cover various quantitative techniques including matching, multiple regression, instrumental variables and the regression discontinuity design. The emphasis will be on the intuition behind these techniques; there are no lab sessions, and the course will not be teaching participants how to implement techniques. Detailed statistical knowledge is not required, although participants who are not familiar with concepts such as "statistically significant", "hypothesis testing", "linear regression", and "expected value" may find some parts challenging."

This course is designed for those who design policy experiments or demonstration projects, those who commission or manage projects which undertake evaluations (or impact assessments), or make decisions on the basis of the estimated impact of policies. It will introduce participants to the various empirical methods that can be used to estimate the impact of a specific policy intervention. The intention is not to teach participants how to estimate the impact of a specific policy intervention or programme but to give an understanding of the suitability of these methods given the nature of the policy under consideration and the available data.

Detailed statistical knowledge is not a pre-requisite.

Sessions will cover the following:

The impact evaluation problem, and how randomized experiments "solve" it
Methods that mimic an experiment: natural experiments, instrumental variables and the regression discontinuity design
Methods that control for confounding factors: multiple regression, matching and taking advantage of longitudinal data

There will also be a group session where participants will be asked to apply their knowledge to comment on the suitability of specific evaluation designs.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Assess whether an actual or proposed design for a programme evaluation is likely to give reliable results, given the nature of the policy under consideration and the available data
Understand what factors to consider when the results from a programme evaluation are being used in policy-making.