This course is designed for master students in the field of agricultural and environmental economics. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of modern empirical methods and their intuitive framework, with an emphasis on causal inference used in applied microeconomics.

The course will spend significantly more time on practical implementation than most other graduate level econometrics courses (at NTU and other universities in Taiwan) do. Students will work on empirical tasks using econometric/statistical software throughout the semester. In turn, the course will not spend much time on the formal details, but the students are still expected to learn some details themselves (mostly from the course references). Following the profession’s convention, the primary software is Stata, but some complementary tools in R will also be introduced.

The course will be structured as semi-flipped-classroom. That is, students are asked to complete relevant virtual lectures and seminars before each session. A general guideline to navigate through the course is (1) read the associated chapters on the main course references (see required readings), (2) complete the assigned virtual lectures and seminars, (3) attend the sessions, and (4) read the assigned readings.