WiSe 24/25: Empirical Public Economics
Peter Haan
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Course Description
This course covers basic topics in public economics from an empirical point of view. We will focus on
empirical studies on the distributional, fiscal and behavioral effects of the tax and transfer system and
public policy. Topics include the effect of income taxation, the design of transfer programs, such as
unemployment insurance, of the pension system, of education or family policies. Further, it is the aim
of the course to provide an overview about the institutions of a welfare state and the current
discussion about reforming or changing welfare states in particular in the context of the demographic
change. The leading example will be public policies in Germany and the current political debate in
Germany. When discussing the relevant literature, we will focus not only on the policy content, but
also on the empirical strategy and evaluation methods. To this end, we will introduce, develop, discuss
and apply different microeconometric techniques to assess the impact and effectiveness of public
policies. Students will learn to read, understand and critically assess empirical research in the area of
public economics, and will gain hands-on experience in their own empirical projects.
Structure: This course consists of two parts, a lecture and a seminar. In the first part, students will be
introduced to the topics and methods covered in the course. Students will learn how to apply various
empirical methods in several computer based exercises in tutorials. In the second part, the seminar,
students will work on a small, own empirical research project and write a term paper on their project.
In this project, you need to apply an empirical method that we discussed in class. We distribute topics
based on empirical papers, which serve as a starting point for your empirical project. You are expected
to work in teams of two or three persons in the main part of the empirical project. We will provide
feedback on the suitability of your topic and relevant data sets. The research projects are accompanied
by seminar meetings in which students present their progress in class. In a final block meeting, students
will present their final term papers.
Prerequisites: In this course, we will provide an introduction how to use empirical methods to causally
answer important policy and economic questions. The prerequisites are intermediate microeconomic
and macroeconomic theory and principles in econometrics. Experience with Stata or R would be
helpful.
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments