PhD15: How to do Economics - This course
is compulsory for all first year PhD students
'How To Do Economics' is a course in research methods - both practical
and theoretical'.
- How to Do Economic Research and Write It Up'
looks at the practical
skills of organizing, structuring, and presenting research. It will
focus on questions like these: How do you write up your research so the
ideas are clear to yourself and everyone else? How do you organize your
dissertation? Is it different from organizing a chapter or article? How
do you write an introduction? How do you structure your argument? Are section
headings decorative or useful? What goes in your conclusion? How do you
write clear sentences? What do you put in an abstract? What are footnotes
for? What goes in an appendix? Is there a painless way to do a bibliography?
The course will also look at how to present research at workshops, seminars
and conferences: how do you tailor your talk to the audience? How do you
keep to time? What are visual aids for? Can you clarify without over-simplifying?
There is no simple answer to these questions, but the course considers
the costs and benefits of different choices.
- 'How To Think about Economics' considers the status of economics
as an empirical and theoretical social science, especially questions like
these: How do social sciences differ from natural sciences, and how does
economics differ from other social sciences? How does economics connect
with other social sciences? How secure are various kinds of economic knowledge?
What is the relation between theory and evidence? Is 'homo economics' a
distortion of 'homo sapiens'? These questions are controversial, and the
course considers them from various epistemological standpoints.
PhD10: Advanced Course in Economic Theory
This course is a topics course on
some frontier issues in economic theory. One half of the course will be taught
by Christopher Harris, who will focus on continuous-time methods in
economics, with an emphasis on stochastic problems. The range of applications
for these techniques is truly vast, and the course can only touch on a few of
them. The applications are likely to include:
- Merton's consumption problem
- Real Options
- Hyperbolic discounting in continuous time
The second half of the course will be taught by Guilherme
Carmona, who will cover various topics in decision theory. These are likely to
include:
- Repeated Games with Complexity Costs
- Repeated Games with Imperfect Monitoring
-
Bounded Memory
PhD11: Advanced Econometrics I
The aim is to build on S300
Econometrics by providing an advanced treatment of some topics in econometrics.
For 2008-9 dynamic heterogenous panel data models and estimation and inference
methods for models specified by sets of moment conditions will be examined. The part covered by Professor Pesaran
provides an up-to-date coverage of the various econometric issues that arise in
the analysis of dynamic panel data models.
It is intended for those interested in getting acquainted with the
econometric techniques needed to carry out analyses of time series across
countries, regions, and/or industries.
Consideration will be given to the different cases arising in practice
where either the number of groups (N) or the number of time periods (T), or
both, is reasonably large.
PhD12: Advanced Econometrics II
This course covers recent
developments in national and global macroeconometric modelling. It deals with some of the most important
concepts, models and methods used in the empirical analysis of macroeconomic
problems with particular emphasis on open macroeconomy models and their global
interactions.
PhD13 Topics in Advanced Macroeconomics
The aim of the course is to introduce currently
popular research topics in macroeconomics as well as techniques and methods for
analysing macroeconomic issues. The list of topics covered may vary from year
to year. For year 2008-09, the course is broadly divided into two parts: (a)
computational methods for macroeconomics and (b) asset markets and the
macroeconomy. The topics covered in the first part include dynamic programming,
linear and perturbation methods, adaptive learning and the parametrised
expectations approach. The topics covered in the second part include a formal
introduction to the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with asset
prices, production and consumption based asset pricing, as well as the effects
of macroeconomic policy on asset markets in the context of rational
expectations and/or adaptive learning (time permitting).
