Many key policy debates, including raising top taxes, EITC expansion, and health insurance reform, involve assessing how policy changes would affect economic activity, government budgets, and the distribution of resources. This course will explore several policy areas and focus on applied economic and empirical methods to show how economists combine theory and data to evaluate such policies. The goal is to enhance applied modeling skills and provide students with methods and practical examples of how these policies are evaluated in agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the US Treasury, and state- and municipal-level economic development agencies.

After illustrating how these approaches apply to inequality and intergenerational mobility and covering key applied tools, we will evaluate the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, enhancing the EITC, local economic development policies, and health insurance reforms. For each policy, we will usually start with applied theory of how the policy change could affect behavior, and then turn to how to structure the empirical analysis in light of the theory, estimate effects and important parameters, and then assess policy implications.