Advanced Microeconomics: Welfare Economics & Market Failures
Two Elective Specialization Courses (not already completed in Year 1)
Following the foundational coursework and preliminary examinations, second-year doctoral students in the ESSEC PhD in Economics program advance to specialized coursework and higher-level methodological training across two academic terms. Below is the course overview for Year 2.
Â
Microeconometrics: Focuses on non-linear econometric models and methods used in analyzing cross-section and panel data. Key topics include maximum likelihood estimation, binary, multinomial, and ordered response models, sample selection, and corner solutions. It also covers linear and non-linear panel data models, instrumental variables, and classical estimation under heterogeneous treatment effects.
Advanced Microeconomics: Welfare Economics & Market Failures: Provides an introduction to contract theory, mechanism design, and asymmetric information. Core themes cover markets with adverse selection, screening, signaling, and the principal-agent framework under both hidden information and hidden actions. It also explores economic applications involving public goods, externalities, insurance, credit markets, and dominant strategy vs. Bayesian implementation.
Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE): Introduces Heterogeneous Agent Macroeconomics (HAM), focusing on Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) models and how micro-level heterogeneity in income, wealth, and consumption affects monetary and fiscal policy transmission. Topics include the Intertemporal Keynesian Cross, wealth distributions, high marginal propensities to consume (MPCs), and the computational/theoretical limitations of Rational Expectations in settings with aggregate risk.
Overlapping Generation Model and Public Policies: Examines demographic turnover and life-cycle behavior in dynamic macroeconomics. Topics cover intertemporal competitive equilibrium efficiency, capital accumulation, public debt, pension reforms, and education policy in the Diamond model. It also addresses private and public intergenerational transfers incorporating parental altruism, as well as perpetual youth formulations in discrete time.
Time Series Analysis: Covers the econometric tools needed to model dynamic, multivariate interactions in time-series data. The curriculum advances from stationary univariate ARMA processes to non-stationary unit root processes, Vector Autoregressions (VAR), cointegration, Structural VARs (SVARs) with impulse response functions, volatility models, and macroeconometric forecasting.
Two Elective Specialization Courses: Students select two doctoral electives not previously taken in Year 1 from the Industrial Organization, International Economics, Public Policy, and Environmental Economics tracks.