Università Roma Tre

The module focuses on the evaluation of the ex-post impacts of public policies. The purpose is to provide students with the concepts and the quantitative skills for approaching policy evaluation. It is organized in three parts. First, it introduces the relevance of the independent evaluation in the evidence-based approach to policy making, the relation between monitoring and evaluation and the key conditions (e.g., data and policy design/implementation) enabling ex-post impact evaluation. Second, it presents the key issue for the identification of causal impacts in non-randomized contexts where most of public policies are designed, and the counterfactual methods that can be used to reproduce randomization in different contexts and to estimate net impacts. Third, it turns concepts into practice showing how to run a counterfactual evaluation to assess the impact of a public policy.
Students will become familiar with the conceptual background and the empirics of policy assessment and will have acquired awareness on the value of adequate data, policy design and methods to ensure robust evaluation able to inform and guide the policy making.