Brandeis International Business School

Prerequisites: ECON 302a, ECON 311a, and knowledge of game theory and calculus. Meets for one-half semester and yields half-course credit. Intended for IBS PhD students.

Develops both reduced form and structural modeling techniques commonly used within the more general field of microeconomics. Throughout the course, there will be an emphasis on the thought process the authors went through in writing the papers. What are the goals of the paper? Why is the question/topic important? Is a non-structural method sufficient for answering the question? Why or why not? What benefits do more complicated structural models yield (in some contexts)? Is the model identified (apart from by functional form)? Are there features missing in the model that bias the findings? Usually offered every second year.
Benjamin Shiller