Lectures on the fundamentals of microeconometrics and methods of causal inference will be given. For example, it is quite difficult to correctly estimate how much of an effect of having an education has on increasing income. This is because individuals who have had better access to education have the potential to earn higher incomes by nature, for example, because they are healthier or because their parents have higher incomes. One goal of microeconometrics is to measure the true effect of education, taking into account the impact of such individual attributes and other factors on income (the analysis is not limited to education and labor, but includes a variety of topics such as healthcare and business, of course).
In the first half of the lecture, students will learn the computation of the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, the interpretation of the results, and the assumptions necessary for the OLS estimator to have statistically desirable properties. The second half of the lecture will introduce various methods for making causal inferences when the OLS assumptions are not satisfied.