This course will focus on the evaluation of a range of public policies that affect human capital formation, broadly defined. The course will emphasize the evaluation of these policies, using a range of empirical techniques, and will highlight areas of expertise of the two instructors.

The grade will be based on continued progress towards the paper assignment, class participation, and one written critical discussion of one of the papers on the reading list below. In this critical discussion, students should: (a) summarize the article, including its motivation, theoretical framework, critical assumptions, econometric methods used and main results; (b) critically assess the contribution of the paper; including the strengths and weaknesses of the paper’s approach, appropriateness of theory, methods and data used, and whether the paper addresses an important issue and assessment of how convincing are the findings of the paper. This assessment should be between 5-10 pages in length (double-spaced). The schedule for progress on the paper assignment is as follows:

April 12:  Submission and class presentation of 5-10 page progress report.

May 30:  Submission of draft paper (20-25 pages)

July 3:  Submission of final draft of paper (30+ pages)

July 10-14:  Presentation and oral defense of research.

In addition to the above course requirements, all students are urged to regularly attend the “Labor and Population” Workshop which is being jointly sponsored by UCLA and RAND. Many eminent people will be giving talks about their work in progress. Regular attendance is the best way to find out what’s hot and what’s not, and to see how successful economists approach empirical problems. Please contact the instructors if you need a ride to a seminar held at RAND.

Detailed Course Syllabus Here in Adobe PDF format.  (Go here to download the Acrobat Reader.)

A List of the readings for the course and the location of the readings on the Internet are here.

Information and guidelines are here.