Research trends: Policy impact evaluation: Future contributions from economics

Economic research has become more empirical, and much of the shift has been due to the broad applications of impact evaluation (or IE) methods for measuring the potential effects of policies or programs on outcomes of interest. The objective of this article is to introduce the essential IE methodology and literature to the audience of this journal and discuss how we can take advantage of these research developments to improve the quality of our own work and subsequent publications. Following an overview of the core IE concepts and methods, we will give an overview of the recent uses of these methods to address forest policy issues and outline the basic steps of sampling and data generation involved in an IE study.