Regular Meeting

Thursdays: 13:00-16:20

  1. 13:00-14:25: Online method lectures (Mainly from AEA Continuing Education)

  2. 14:35-15:25: Student presentation on a recent or forthcoming paper in top 6 journals + AEJ + EJ, or NBER working papers

    • Top 6 journals: Econometrica, AER, JPE, QJE, REStud, REStat

  3. 15:30-16:20: Progress report on research projects (≥M2), or video conference sessions (last week of the month) on development economics

    • Yijun --> Bomb --> Pham --> Hanchen --> Wataru

    • Individual informal talk with the presenter after the meeting

  • Only online method lectures on the second Thursdays of the month due to the faculty meeting (13:00-14:30).


Activities and Purposes

  • Web lectures on economics and econometrics (AEA-Continuing Education, NBER Summer Institute,...)

    • To strengthen your analytical skills.

    • To understand what you can do and what you cannot do with the data available to you.

    • To enhance the efficiency of academic discussion in the lab.

  • Student presentations on recent or forthcoming papers in top journals or NBER working papers on specific topics.

    • To understand and catch up with the frontier of economics research.

    • To "install" the structure of good papers on you.

    • To understand the methodology used in detail.

    • The topic will rotate every 2 months (i.e. 6-7 papers). The first paper of each round should be a seminal paper on that topic.

      • Each student is supposed to list up two papers as the candidate papers (Searching papers is actually a good practice to learn the trend and development of the research).

      • A student coordinator (Hanchen for this term) will make the finalized list of the papers after consulting with me. Please coordinate with each other who will present which paper and when.

    • Topics under consideration include:

      • Labor market

      • Insurance

      • Finance

      • Intrahousehold model

      • Industrial Policy

      • Structural transformation

  • Progress report on own research projects

    • I found many students have the same problem in starting and proceeding their research projects, namely, research design and identification strategy. Instead of supervising each student independently, I believe this "group supervision" will help students understand how to start and proceed the research more efficiently. Students will be able to get advice from other students as well.

    • A good research idea will not occur to you all of a sudden. It should be an outcome of iterative process including brain storming, conceptualization, clarifying analytical framework, clarifying contribution to the literature, checking data availability that enables you to estimate the parameters of interests, continuous discussion with others, ...

    • Don't be shy to present your ideas. Don't be afraid of your ideas being criticized. Actually most ideas should be criticized, and thought-provoking ideas will be always criticized.

    • Make presentation slides. Get feedback. Revise your slides. Get feedback. Then your research will proceed.

    • You should ask to yourself: What is the big picture of your research. How will it benefit the science or society.

  • Note:

    • Students are strongly recommended to attend the AEDS seminar and other economic seminars.


Optional: Friday 12:00-13:00

  • Watch web seminars on development economics and related fields at lunch time.

  • Under the current situation of the COVID-19, the meeting will be held via zoom.

  • Currently watching BREAD-IGC Virtual PhD Course, Spring 2022