PPHS 617. Impact Evaluation.

This course will cover methods for estimating the effects of social interventions on health outcomes. We will provide the intuition for conducting impact evaluation studies in population health and discuss recent developments. We will define causal policy effects within the potential outcomes framework and introduce and formally define policy-relevant research questions based on specific causal contrasts. We will cover the use of randomized and cluster randomized trials for impact evaluation, including cost-effectiveness. We will additionally cover quasi-experimental designs such as interrupted time series, difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity.