Economics Courses

This course covers a range of econometric evaluation techniques that are used to gauge policy impacts (with a focus on microeconomic contexts). Consideration is given to standard regression-based approaches, instrumental methods, difference-in-differences and matching methods. Please get in touch for the full course outline.

Cost benefit analysis (CBA) lies at the heart of policy appraisal in Government and increasingly for the private and voluntary sector too. For CBA to be useful in informing resource allocation decisions, we need to accurately measure all the causal impacts of the policy and to attach a monetary value to them.

The three-day course combines ‘workshop’ and ‘surgery’ activities, with learning on key issues that need to be considered in the development of a Business Case. Over the three days of the course the learning activities will be focused around the ‘live’ business case that each attendee has been tasked with developing.

The aim of these half-day modules is to enable students develop a better understanding of economic statistics and its uses in the policy making arena. This includes interpreting and analysing economic statistics while understanding its limitations.

This programme consists of five 'Masters-level' modules. Participants will gain a detailed knowledge of the theory, general principles and key concepts of taxation.

This course provides an introduction to the ways in which analysts measure inequality and poverty, addressing conceptual issues and practical matters including data. There are also hands-on sessions in the computer lab.

This two day course is designed to serve as an introduction to panel data analysis and emphasis will be placed on providing an intuitive explanation of the underlying theory and the practical implementation thereof.

This course will introduce you to the field of Data Science using the industry standard: the Python programming language. We will cover key steps involved in solving practical problems with data, from access and manipulation, to processing and visualisation. These topics will be explored from a “hands-on” perspective using a modern Python stack (e.g. pandas, matplotlib), and examples using real-world data. We will start with an overview of the main ways to access and manipulate data in Python. Then we will move on to visualisation, learning to create figures that allow you to better understand your data. We will finish the course with some time for questions and to work on your own data.

This two day programme provides a comprehensive introduction to STATA and enables participants to practice application of the issues covered. As a result, delegates will understand (i) the theory behind particular quantitative (mainly econometric) techniques and (ii) how to physically code these into STATA and understand its outputs.

The course is voluntarily directed to non-experts. While it covers the theoretical definition of the main national accounts aggregates, it does it in a lively manner based on the concrete experience of the teacher.

This two day course provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and methods of social impact and social value measurement covering the ethics of social value and best-practice methodology and latest research in the field.

This practical, two-day workshop will present an overview of the manipulations of data that are often required prior to statistical analysis. Topics will include dealing with outliers, combining data from different sources, calculating annual average growth rates, weighting and smoothing data and constructing indexes. It was also cover basic statistical methods used in describing data such as measures of central tendency and dispersion, correlation and the use of dummy variables in regression analysis.

One of the most important economic statistics published by the ONS has been the inflation rate: first measured by RPI, more recently by CPI and currently also by CPIH. This two-day course will start by briefly exploring the economic and statistical theory behind the construction of these price indices.

This Wellbeing in Economics, Statistics and Social Research course is designed and delivered by academics, and public sector analysts, economics and statisticians at the 'coal-face' using wellbeing in government policy development.