79078 - Workshop: Building Empirical Case Studies in Health Economics

Learning outcomes

At the end of the workshop the student has fully developed under standard econometric packages a portfolio of case studies in applied health economics, through the following steps: 1) data collection, managing and validation 2) definition of key question and model specification 3) estimation and testing 4) post-estimation analysis and reporting. The focus is on preparatory work (steps 1 and 2) and post-estimation analysis (step 4). At the end of the course the student is able to develop his/her own applied studies from scratch.

Course contents

The purpose of this workshop is to provide an overview of the most useful tools to conduct empirical quantitative analysis in health economics using STATA. The workshop is built around empirical studies and the emphasis will be on learning by example. At the end of the workshop, the students will be able to:

1. Autonomously find and extract data from the on-line data repository of the most relevant International Organizations (WHO, OECD, FAO, etc.)
2. Manage large dataset from National Surveys (Health surveys, Household Budget surveys, Nutritional surveys and other)
3. Prepare the data and perform descriptive analysis
4. Perform quantitative analysis on health data and (most important) understand the outputs (the focus will be on regression analysis and other multivariate methods and quasi-experimental methods for impact assessment)
5. Detect and report relevant results using tables and graphs

Teaching methods

Practical sessions using STATA. Classes are held in the Computer Lab. As concerns the teaching methods of this course unit, all students must attend Module 1, 2 on Health and Safety online.

Teaching tools

The Unibo e-learning platform (Virtuale) will be used to share teaching materials and assignments to students. The purpose of the assignments is to let the students practice and get familiar with the methods and software; they will not be used for evaluation purposes.

Office hours

See the website of Beatrice Biondi