Quick announcements:
- Your midterms will be returned on Wednesday in class.
- See below for details on the course project.
- The midterm grading guide is here.
On Monday, we will talk about using data to make cause-and-effect arguments, covering material in Chapter 9 of the course packet. Key ideas:
- causal questions as counterfactuals
- experiments and placebo-controlled trials
- balanced comparisons and identification strategies
- natural experiments
- matching
- model-based statistical adjustment
On Wednesday, we will finish up what remains of Chapter 9. We will then work on the green buildings case study in class. For this you will want to start with the green_match.R file from the R Scripts tab, above.
Project
There are no exercises this week, or for the next two weeks. Instead, you should be devoting this time to your projects.
A full description of the project requirements can be found here. They are on Friday, April 6, 2018 at 5 PM. Note: you need to turn in a hard copy of the write-up for grading purposes. You must also turn in electronic copies of the data set, write-up, and R script(s); see the project description for details.
Readings
This week’s material comes from Chapter 9. Please finish reading this chapter by the end of this week. In case you want to get ahead of things, next week we will cover Chapters 10 and 11 in class.
A note on readings: for the next three weeks, as you work on your projects, there will be less out-of-class stuff to keep up with (i.e. no exercises, no videos). There will still be readings, but since there are no lecture videos, we will cover all of this material in class. Therefore, for the next three weeks, it is not essential to have read ahead in the course packet before you come to class (though you certainly still need to read the material).
After the projects are due, I will start asking you once again to read ahead before coming to class, but I will note clearly (both in class and on the website) when that happens.