Answer:The need for evidence-based policy in the field of education is increasingly recognized
(e.g., Commission of the European Communities 2007). However, providing empirical
evidence suitable for guiding policy is not an easy task, because it refers to causal inferences
that require special research methods which are not always easy to communicate due to their
technical complexity. This paper surveys the methods that the economics profession has
increasingly used over the past decade to estimate effects of educational policies and
practices. These methods are designed to distinguish accidental association from causation.
They provide empirical strategies to identify the causal impact of different reforms on any
kind of educational outcomes.
The paper is addressed at policy-makers, practitioners, students, and researchers from other
fields who are interested in learning about causal relationships at work in education, but are
not familiar with modern econometric techniques. Among researchers, the exposition is not
aimed at econometricians who use these techniques, but rather at essentially any interested
non-econometrician – be it theoretical or macro economists or non-economist education
researchers. The aim is to equip the interested reader with the intuition of how recent methods
for causal evaluation work and to point out their strengths and caveats. This will not only
facilitate the reading of recent empirical studies evaluating educational policies and practices,
but also enable the reader to interpret results and better judge the ability of a specific
application to identify a causal effect. To do so, this paper provides a guide to the most recent
methods that tries to circumvent any econometric jargon, technicality, and detail.1
Instead, it
discusses just the key idea and intuition of each of the methods, and then illustrates how each
can be used by a real-world example study based on a successful application of the method,
with a particular focus on European examples.
It is, however, useful to note that the methods described here are by no means confined to
the economics profession. In fact, it was the American Educational Research Association,
with its broad range of interdisciplinary approaches to educational research in general, which
recently published an extensive report on “Estimating Causal Effects using Experimental ideas
Explanation: As related above