Since the 1700s, improvements in average living standards have increasingly become a permanent feature of economic life around the globe. Such a process was associated with a new economic system organised around private property, with markets, firms, and governments playing major roles. Advances in technology and the specialisation in products and tasks have raised the amount of goods that can be produced in a given period. Still, we have also documented growing ecological threats and unprecedented global inequalities. Economics studies how people interact with each other and the environment at different levels. This course aims to help you develop consistent thinking on major economic themes with particular attention to historical and macro elements.
Introduce students to basilar economic concepts emphasising their historical elements.
Provide initial insights on what it means to ''think as an economist''.
Introduce students to fundamental elements of macroeconomic theory.
As long as economics has existed as a subject of study, mathematics has been used as its primary language. It allows a quantifiable representation of concepts such as prices and production and is a powerful way of analysing the relationships among these variables. Economists think, explain, and argue in terms of economic models. Modelling does not have to be mathematical, but such a language brings precision, logical rigour, and the capacity to deal as clearly as possible with complex systems, making it extremely valuable for analysing economic problems. This course aims to help you develop consistent thinking on a wide range of mathematical techniques that will be useful in speaking the language of economists.
Introduce students to mathematical tools useful in their academic trajectories.
Provide initial insights on what "think as an economist" means.
Introduce students to fundamental elements of Calculus and Linear Algebra.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with an economy's performance, structure, behaviour, and decision-making. It includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study aggregated indicators such as GDP, unemployment rates, national income, price indices, and the interrelations among the different sectors to better understand how the whole economy functions. This course aims to help develop consistent thinking about some critical macroeconomic phenomena.
Introduce students to a more formal and integrated analysis of business cycles, growth, and policy intervention.
Integrate Keynesian and classical macroeconomic theories.
Introduce students to case studies and macro data interpretation.
Despite being located at extreme points of the set of possible evolutionary paths, humans and social insects have colonised a large share of the earth's biomass. Their reproductive success lies in their particular social nature, which entails a sophisticated division of labour. In terms of human organisation, a tremendous change occurred with the Industrial Revolution. Whereas it had taken until the 1800s for the world population to reach 1 billion, the second billion was achieved less than 150 years later, and we arrived at the 21st century counting more than 6 billion people. We face a complex set of global changes to how we conceive and structure our everyday lives. How do we find a way forward? This course aims to give a general overview of Five challenges:
Climate change and global warming.
Rising wealth and income inequality.
Will robots take my job?
International trade and Global Value Chains (GVC).
China and the emergence of a multipolar world.
Over the past few decades, behavioural economics has dramatically transformed our discipline, putting the human element back into economics. This course gives students a comprehensive overview of key results and insights from such a fascinating field. The micro section introduces concepts from mental accounting to prospect theory, present bias, and inequality aversion. The second part of the course deals with bounded rationality in macroeconomics. It includes considerations on real-financial market interactions and climate change dynamics. Numerical experiments are used to simulate decision-making processes and analyse how human behaviour interacts with economic complexity. This hands-on approach allows students to apply behavioural insights to real-world economic issues:
Introduce students to behavioural economics.
Provide initial insights and definitions on heuristics, biases, and choices.
Hands-on approach to behavioural macroeconomics.
The last three or four decades have seen a remarkable evolution in the modern monetary system institutions. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 was a wake-up call that we need a similar evolution in the analytical apparatus and theories used to study that system. This course will help you to understand the role that financial institutions and markets play in the business environment and the connection between financial markets, financial institutions and the economy:
Bring a fresh perspective to major questions surrounding monetary policy.
Introduce students to the monetary policy process, the regulation and supervision of the financial system, and the internationalisation of financial markets.
Discuss the causes and consequences of the last financial crisis.