The Power of Microdata: An Introduction

Abstract

Public organisations collect, supervise and keep track of extremely varied and extensive types of data. Modern technologies and better-organised civil lives have greatly facilitated the collection and custody of these data with a minute granularity and a scale previously unknown. This allows for a much more detailed and sound knowledge of economies and societies. Action should be taken to use these data for a better, easier and more cost-effective evaluation of policies while safeguarding confidentiality of data. At a moment of increasing attention to the efficacy of public spending, it is more important than ever to be able to learn what effects policy measures have on citizens’ lives and societies.

Automated impact assessment - How digitizing government enables rapid and tailor-made policy responses.

“…This in turn requires integrated data from different sources and appropriate econometric methods and models to assess public administration actions and responses [14]. As the MALLE framework shows, an appropriate combination of data and econometric models can provide policymakers with significant support, complementary tools and decision-making bases [14]. Building on this, this study makes three observations.…”

“…It remains important to compare the stated goals with tangible results and to see what works the best in the policy-making cycle. This in turn requires integrated data from different sources and appropriate econometric methods and models to assess public administration actions and responses [14]. As the MALLE framework shows, an appropriate combination of data and econometric models can provide policymakers with significant support, complementary tools and decision-making bases [14].…”

“…Consequently, it is not limited to the assessment of public policies, but also to the assessment of individual indicators at the micro level. A high granularity of data is an important part of the evidence for policy as it allows to find more details about it [14]. This cannot be achieved without a sufficient degree of digitalization in public administration and automation, which would reduce the time required to process individual inquiries.…”

A Data Science Maturity Model Applied to Students' Modeling

“…Some counterfactual questions can be answered using appropriate statistical techniques, named counterfactual impact evaluation methods. Regression Discontinuity Design and Differences in Differences allow an intuitive graphical representation [34]. Regression Discontinuity Design is a quasi-experimental impact evaluation method that uses a cutoff point in addition to the input dataset.…”

Social Policy in Changing European Societies

“…For instance, in the Nordic countries, welfare and population management are largely based on administrative databases, which allow standardized, nation-wide assessment of citizens' needs as well as determination of deservingness and just allocation of public resources (Dencik & Kaun, 2020: 2;Larsson & Haldar, 2021). The national register datasets are paramount for 'evidence-based policy', where -in the positivist public administration and social policy research tradition -data are central in assessing and evaluating the impact of public policy and interventions (Crato & Paruolo, 2019). Through datafication and a massive increase of devices connected to the internet, digital technologies produce unprecedented amounts of data.…”