Northwestern Law School Workshops on Research Design for Causal Inference

Dear BLPB Readers:

For those of you who might be interested in strengthening your knowledge of empirical methods, Northwestern Law School is offering two summer workshops on Research Design for Causal Inference.  An overview of the main workshop and its target audience is below.  The complete details of the main and advanced workshops are here.

"Main Workshop Overview

We will cover the design of true randomized experiments and contrast them to natural or quasi experiments and to pure observational studies, where part of the sample is treated, the remainder is a control group, but the researcher controls neither which units are treated vs. control, nor administration of the treatment. We will assess the causal inferences one can draw from specific "causal" research designs, threats to valid causal inference, and research designs that can mitigate those threats.

Most empirical methods courses survey a variety of methods. We will begin instead with the goal of causal inference, and how to design a research plan to come closer to that goal, using messy, real-world datasets with limited sample sizes. The methods are often adapted to a particular study.

Target Audience

Quantitative empirical researchers (faculty and graduate students) in social science, including law, political science, economics, many business-school areas (finance, accounting, management, marketing, etc.), medicine, sociology, education, psychology, etc. –  anywhere that causal inference is important.

We will assume knowledge, at the level of an upper-level undergraduate econometrics or similar course, of multivariate regression, including OLS, logit, and probit; basic probability and statistics including confidence intervals, t-statistics, and standard errors; and some understanding of instrumental variables. This course should be suitable both for researchers with recent PhD-level training in econometrics and for empirical scholars with reasonable but more limited training."