Sustainable Economic Policy in a Changing World - Q3

Course Content

Short Description: Pick a policy, find a shock, build a panel, test the effect.

This seminar explores national and regional policy challenges in an era of economic transformation.

Example questions can be:

1. How do family and fertility policies such as parental leave, childcare expansion, or child benefits, affect fertility and female labor participation?

2. How do wars and sanctions reshape trade flows, prices, and industrial structures?

3. What are the effects of trade reconfiguration carbon border adjustments and export bans on employment and production?

4. How do climate and energy policies influence emissions, investment, and inequality? Do governance and anti-corruption reforms improve public spending efficiency?

5. How do urban transport policies or housing regulations such as rent controls affect the apartment shortage in cities?

6. Does social housing or migration shocks affect local education?

7. What happens to economic inequality if we face an increase in immigration?

The seminar is designed to provide the methodological foundation for empirical, data-based research in using examples from sustainable economic policy in the context of demographic change, geopolitical shocks (wars), social policy and trade reconfiguration. With Stata, students learn to build and analyze panel datasets, implement difference-in-differences with synthetic control, and fixed-effects OLS, and maintain a reproducible workflow, while writing a stand-alone 10-page seminar paper.

Intended Learning Outcomes and Competencies

Students will be able to:

Formulate and assess empirical questions and testable hypotheses in sustainable policy domains (e.g., fertility incentives, social- and economic policy, war-related trade disruptions, climate policy responses).

Collect, merge, and document data from multiple sources into a clean panel structure (country–year, region–year).

Implement FE-OLS, DiD, and Synthetic Control in Stata and interpret results with appropriate diagnostics.

Produce clear tables/figures (e.g., esttab, event-study plots) and maintain a reproducible workflow (do-files, logs, README).

Form of Examination