In this course, we looked at designs of impact evaluation, mainly of policy interventions. We discussed the desirability of evaluations and the main conceptual problems in identifying the causal impact of policy interventions. We discussed different econometric techniques that had been proposed in the literature to deal with issues relating to the economics behind the evaluation problem.

Crime imposes large social costs and therefore is a problem that every country actively tries to suppress. The challenge for policy-makers is to find cost-effective strategies to deal with the burdens of crime (consistent with humanitarian and constitutional requirements). In this course we considered the latest empirical research on a variety of topics related to the criminal justice system, with the intention of understanding how economists think about criminal behavior and what works to reduce crime.