Simulando dados para ensinar avaliação de impacto de políticas públicas: uma abordagem prática

Abstract

One of the main methodological challenges faced by Economics and Political Science is to evaluate the impact of public policies. Did the conditional income transfer policy increase the years of schooling of the children of the families benefiting from the program? Does increasing the minimum wage raise unemployment? Did charging for baggage handling reduce the price of airline tickets? Finding answers to these questions is not a trivial task. Usually, to avoid biases in the analysis, experimental or quasi-experimental designs are used that are difficult to understand for students with little knowledge of econometrics and statistics. In this work, I propose the use of simulated data to teach the intuition behind these designs in a didactic way and present practical examples.