Teaching

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the epistemic and ethical foundations of contemporary climate change economics and policy. It dives behind the technical sophistication of integrated assessment models, carbon pricing schemes, loss and damage mechanisms, among other climate economics and policy instruments to examine the important value-laden assumptions these tools rest on, for instance regarding uncertainty and risk, responsibility and justice, rationality and decision-making. It critically discusses the philosophical and social science considerations that are invoked to justify these assumptions and details how these shape economic modelling of climate change, as well as global climate policy; in this context, particular attention is given to positive social tipping points. More generally, the transformative potential of these climate economic and policy instruments will be considered in a broader global justice perspective. The seminar draws on pluridisciplinary resources from climate economics and ethics, philosophy of science, political philosophy, ecological economics, and critical social sciences and is open to students from philosophy, political science, economics and climate science. 

This course provides an introduction on the different epistemologies present in social sciences, and explores three of the main methodological approaches present in today's social sciences: methodological individualism, equilibrium reasoning and the quest of causality. For each approach I provide a general presentation of the methodology and selected papers to read and to discuss. They serve as a basis for students to select papers to present, discuss and write an essay upon.

This course explores the methodological foundations of economics: the quest for causality, equilibrium reasonings, and the revealed preferences approach. The aim is to equip students with the necessary tools to effectively navigate existing economic research in order to obtain answers to real-world questions.

Formal approaches in epistemology have received increasing interest in recent years. This course will offer an overview of their development in two fields: social epistemology and degrees of beliefs. I will introduce basic concepts of game and decision theory as well as bayesian network modelling and discuss their relevance for these fields.

This is a theoretical course on the economics of financial decision making, at the crossroads between Microeconomics and Finance. It discusses portfolio choice theory, risk sharing, market equilibrium and asset pricing. The objective is to familiarise students with the economics of financial decision making and develop their intuition regarding the determination of asset prices and the notions of optimal risk sharing. 

The course introduces the theory of information, as it is used in microeconomics. It will first present models of decision under risk and uncertainty, and the role and value of information in economics. It will then review basic issues in the field of microeconomics: the theory of insurance, the theory of agency, the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. Specific economic situations were these situations arise will be taken as examples.

Game Theory aims at analyzing strategic situations, that is, situations in which the payoff of an agent payoff may depend on the actions of other agents. Examples of strategic situations are situations are situations of conflict, cooperation, coordination, information transmission or manipulation. Game theory has applications in several fields, such as economics, politics, law and biology. In this course, we will introduce the basic tools of game theory, and some of the main applications of game theory will be outlined.