When and Where
academic year 2019/2020
28 hours divided in 14 lectures; starting on April 14, 2020
e-learning on the UniSi Moodle platform
recorded video lectures and other material
Material used
The course will be mainly based on:
Topics and division of the course
This is a laboratory course, lasting 28 hours (14 lectures of 2 hours each). The language used is (English and) Python. You are encouraged to use your own laptop (all software and material is open and free). The intended audience is formed by students in economics, with little to no knowledge of programming. The aim of the course is providing the students with some basic tools of programming and make them able to look for solutions and search for the appropriate tools, according to their needs. Most of the time in class will be dedicated to notions and exercises on programming. Individual and group work will be dedicated to apply these notions to economic problems. Broadly speaking, topics include: an introduction to what programming is and some basics of coding; some classical examples and problems in economics and how to use programming to tackle and solve them.
In more detail
About Python
setting up a Python environment with Anaconda; using Jupyter Notebook, editors;
Programming (and Python) essentials
strings, lists;
if-else conditional statements; loop constructs; control flow;
functions; local and global variables;
iteration, recursion;
dictionaries, generators, and other data structures;
working with files; regular expressions;
errors and exceptions;
Basics of object-oriented programming
Scientific libraries and packages
NumPy, SciPy, Pandas
data and empirics: Pandas for panel data; similarities with R
Classic examples and applications in economics (according to the audience’s interests)
Optimal savings: permanent income model;
Schelling’s segregation model;
other examples:
basics of web scraping (data extraction from the Internet);
social network analysis (the rise of the Medici family in Florence - J. F. Padgett, C. K. Ansell 1993).
Examination and evaluation
You are expected to attend the course;
exercises and examples will be assigned and solved in class;
groups (of, ideally, 3-4 people) will be assigned or choose a classic (economic) problem and will make a presentation of the economic model and its programming implementation and solution;
the last lecture(s) will be dedicated to listening to and commenting on these presentations.