On March 9, we will have a preparatory meeting for, where we will discuss the organization of the seminar and the remaining time line.

Entry requirements

The seminar is intended for graduate students with an interest in macroeconomic questions. Participants should have prior training in macroeconomics (at least on an intermediate level) and knowledge of microeconometrics methods (such as difference-in-differences estimator, instrumental variables approaches, and regression discontinuity designs).

Objectives

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In this seminar, we will discuss most recent paper published in this literature.

Content

We will mainly focus on causal factors in economic growth (such as, institutions and political economy, social structure, trust and civic capital) but also discuss the permanent income hypothesis (i.e., reaction of consumption to expected and unexpected income changes), and fiscal multipliers.

Article Report and Classroom Presentation

Each student has to prepare a classroom presentation of her/his article and write an article report. The classroom presentation (and the article report) should contain:

• a concise statement of the evaluation (outcome, treatment, theory of change, hypothesis)
• a brief discussion of related literature and existing evidence
• a short discussion of the institutional background
• a summary of how the author goes about achieving those goals (data, evaluation method)
• a critical discussion of the identifying assumptions (critiques, praise, open questions)
• a short summary of the results a
  • focus on the main results of the article; do not go over every robustness check & every specification
• a discussion of potential policy implications

The presentation should be 25 minutes. Note, I will enforce a strict time limit. Following each presentation, we will have a short discussion (where the audience is asked to focus on the identification and the policy implications). Here you can download the schedule: link.

The article report should be 5 pages (i.e. about 2,200 to 2,400 words).