Evaluation and the causal revolution

Readings

• The syllabus, content, examples, and assignments pages for this class
• Chapter 1 in Impact Evaluation in Practice Paul J. Gertler et al., Impact Evaluation in Practice, 2nd ed. (Inter-American Development Bank; World Bank, 2016), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25030.
• DJ Patil, “What Makes a Radical and Revolutionary Technology?”
  • (DJ Patil is the former Chief Data Scientist of the United States under President Obama. He gave this forum address at Brigham Young University on February 13, 2018.)
• Stephen Goldsmith, “Next Generation of Public Employees Must Understand Data and Policy”
• Hadley Wickham, “Data Science: How is it Different To Statistics?”

Slides

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

• Introduction
• Data science and public service
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (1)
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (2)
• Class details

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Data science and public service
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (1)
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (2)
• Class details

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

Optional lab

Here are all the materials we used in the lab:

• CSV of the cars dataset
• RStudio.cloud project
• Slides
• Project .zip file (the slides are in here too)