Expectations

Please come to class prepared and ready to participate. Attendance is very important for this class because we don’t have a single textbook source that covers everything. That said, life happens and I completely understand that. I’ve tried to structure the grading so that attendance is incentivized without any unnecessary punishment for exceptions.

Overall, the class material and assignments are probably 40% theory, 40% empirical work, and 20% linking the data and theory to current policy. By “empirical work,” I do not mean that I expect everyone to have taken an advanced statistics or econometrics course. For all of the homework assignments, I will provide any relevant data to you. I expect you to be able to import the data into your statistics or spreadsheet program of choice — this may be R, or Stata, or SAS, or Excel, etc. Just about any program will do. Once imported, I expect you to be able to calculate basic summary statistics like an average, perhaps by different groups or different time periods. I also expect you to present these calculations in an easily-readable way (i.e., as part of a table or figure).

Importantly, if you don’t have much experience working with real data, then I don’t expect you to learn to do this completely on your own. I am a resource for you, and I will be available as much as possible to help you throughout the semester. Of course, I can’t help you if you don’t reach out to me, and I definitely can’t help you if you only reach out a few hours before the due date.

So…here are my rules to be successful in this class:

Attend and participate in class
Do all of the worksheets, in-class practice problems, and exam review problems
Start on the homework assignments and the project early
Ask me questions!