Emails

• I have put class material and other details under our class website https://sebastiantellotrillo.com/classes. Feel free to check and let me know if there are any questions or things I missed while updating the schedule.
• The books for the class are recommended but strongly suggested!
• Please fill out this survey before the first day of class: https://forms.gle/AnhSJTxVoMvyZ6rp9

1. I have posted the recordings of today’s lecture on our class website. This is where I’ll post the recordings and the slides. I probably won’t send an email every time I post them, I’ll just assume you know where to find them.
2. As the website will bring new items make sure you “refresh” the page every time you access it so that you can see the latest updates. Alternatively, you can access the website through a private browsing.
3. I forgot to mention that the books I talked about our under UVA inclusive access policy, which I think it means you can access the books online through Canvas>Inclusive access.
4. Next week we’ll have lectures on measurement and size. These lectures don’t have readings attached to them (they don’t touch them on the books), so it’ll be mainly a lecture-based content, just an FYI.

Hi Everyone! Hope you are enjoying this lovely Friday! Couple of things: We’ve added a couple of worksheets, the RMDA 1 practice (with answers), and 2 worksheets on how to use globals and the esttab command. These are just some useful commands to know for making things easier in STATA. Again, these don’t have any particular due date, just go over them as you have time.As some of you may have noticed, we’ve released HW 1. We will put the assignment on gradescope for you to submit your answers in a few days.Quiz 1 has been released and you have more than 48 hours to do it (due Sunday 8pm I think) and about 1 hour to complete it. (Only 3 questions)For people who have SDAC accommodations for now please use the 1-hour slot and if you want more time, just let me know. Trying to figure out a way I can extend the per individual as oppose to creating a new assignment. Hope y’all enjoy the intro lectures. In some sense, I have started with “the end,” and by the end, I mean the limitations of causal inference. In short, once we have a causal estimate, the story of “how to pick the best policy” doesn’t stop there; you have to consider other estimates, cost, timing, and other considerations. To an extent, all of that stuff you’ll be learning in IPA and have a chance to even practice applications in your APP. Think of what you are learning in your econ-courses as understanding how to think about policies and even how to design policies. Finally, think of politics and the leadership component of the curriculum on how to get things passed or enacted once you know or think what’s best. So that’s how all of these core classes connect. It’s easy to see that at the core of any policy conversation, whether we’ll pass it or not, whether it’s cost-effective or not, or whether theory predicts it should or not work a simple question remains: How do we know if a policy is doing the things that are intended to do? How do we determine if a policy actually affects what it’s supposed to? For that, we need to understand how to establish a causal relationship, and that’s the path we’ll start walking in the following lecture on Tuesday. Onwards, we go into the depths of the dark arts that is causality.

• HW 1 has been posted on gradescope, so you should be able to write down your answers there. A few details on that
• You only need to submit one assignment per group, the way this work on gradescope is, one person will put the answers, you then click submit, and on the bottom right you should see a button that says “Group Members” click on this and pick your members.
• You are welcome to re-submit as many times as you would like before the final due date, clicking submit is not final until the due date.
• If you fancy writing in Latex for writing a regression so that it looks pretty the way to do it is by using $$ at the start and end of the Latex part, and then you just write like you normally would and call the greek letters by their name and with a \. For example:
• $$ y=\alpha + \beta x $$ will write a regression in your answer box (and you can see it).

• Quiz 3 has been released and is due MONDAY night, not Sunday night. It looks bigger, but that’s because the way it is structured now will allow for partial credit better than the last quizzes.
• HW2 has been released due Wednesday, February 21. Gradescope version will appear soon. Start as early as you can!

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• New worksheet dropped on size, climate, and non-linearities. Just a good practice hw.

• New worksheet drop on IV (this is a paper that explains things well with an interesting policy example: the foster care system)
• HW2 has been posted on Gradescope, so feel free to start copying and pasting your answers. Please remember that the deadline is this coming Wednesday.
• HW1 has been returned to y’all, and answers have also been released.
• Quiz 4 is out now and due Monday night.