Economics

Educational objectives

The course aims to:
1) Provide students with the knowledge of the essential aspects and tools of environmental and resource economics, with a specific focus on sustainable development and climate change.
2) Help students to develop the capacity to transfer the acquired knowledge and skills into real world applications.
3) Introduce students to the scholarly debate in the field of environmental economics, especially regarding the most debated issues regarding sustainable development and climate change.

At the end of the course students will have acquired competence on the foundations of an economic approach to environmental issues and on the objectives and instruments of climate change control policies. Knowledge of the typical topics of an environmental economics course will be developed in the wider conceptual framework of an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability. Students will acquire knowledge of the instruments for setting the targets and implementing environmental regulations.

At the end of the course, students will have developed the capacity to:
1) Transfer the acquired knowledge and skills into real world applications.
2) Read and critically assess graduate-level reading on environmental economics and policy issues, such as academic papers and policy reports by governments, environmental associations, and international organizations.
3) Participate to the current policy debate on issues like climate change and the sustainability of development.

Educational objectives

The Advanced Course in Monetary Economics and Policy aims at introducing students to the recent debate on the theory of monetary policy. To this end, students learn the concepts, methodologies and analytical tools which are necessary to understand the advanced theoretical models on the subject matter. Special attention is devoted to the analysis of dynamical system, to the methods of expectation formation and to the foundations of game theory. Based on these conceptual and analytical elements, the course pursues the general objective of deepening the main theoretical issues which contributed to design the monetary policy regimes actually realised in the last decades. In this way, the course allows students to understand the current debate on the accomplished realizations and on the limits encountered by the central banks of the main industrialized countries. This requires to devote a specific part of the course to the theoretical models recently employed to identify the optimal behaviour of central banks. In this way, the course offers students the possibility to learn both advanced theoretical notions, which are useful to understand the real economic world and which are necessary for those who wish to continue the study of economics, and the actual behaviour of monetary authorities, of particular relevance for those who are interested in monetary and financial issues and wish to enter the labour market after the Laurea. The acquisition of all the tools that are necessary to achieve the teaching targets is guaranteed by specific sections of the program.

Acquired knowledge
Students passing the exam know at an upper intermediate level the most recent theory of monetary policy and they understand the most recent theoretical models underlying the behaviour of the central banks of the main industrialized countries. They possess the advanced mathematical and economic tools required by this task and have a particularly good knowledge of game theory and economic dynamics. They understand the problems introduced into monetary economic modelling by the presence of multiplicative uncertainty. Specific knowledge refers to both New Classical and New Keynesian theorising in monetary policy, to the design of constraints on central banking and to the problem of transparency in monetary policy. The simulation of dynamical economic systems is known at an introductory level.

Acquired skills
Students passing the exam are able to understand the current debate on the theory of monetary policy and to read without any problem National and International reports on central banking by private and public institutions (starting from the monthly bulletins and the annual reports by central banks, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the other main international institutions). They read without difficulties scientific papers on the studied topics at an upper intermediate level. They are also able to construct upper intermediate models employing game theory and dynamic optimisation methods. They can simulate the response of economic variable to shocks in basic dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models by use of the Dynare freeware software. Finally, they can understand the motivations underlying the actual choices of central banks and to derive their effects on the (current and expected) main economic variables.

Educational objectives

The course aims to introduce students to the study of public economics at an advanced level. In particular, the aim of the course is to deepen some issues relating to the role of the public sector in the economy and to the main public finance topics in the current debate. The program will enable students to acquire the necessary theoretical knowledge to assess the opportunity of the public sector intervention into the economy. This also will allow to capture specific aspects of the economic and political debate on the role of the public sector. For this purpose, the theoretical aspects (especially regarding public spending, budget balances, debt, inequality and poverty reduction, etc.) will be complemented by some empirical applications of policy instruments used both at national and international levels. Particular attention will be paid to the European context.

At the end of the course and after passing the exam, students will be able to understand the outcome of modern research in public economics. In particular, they will be able to critically assess the main theoretical and empirical models with respect to public spending growth, budget balance sustainability and the formation of political decisions, as a result of different voting systems. Students can use these models for analyzing the economic patterns at an advanced level, interpreting what happens in real economic world, and actively participating to the economic policy debate, interpreting what happens in real economic world, and actively participating to the economic policy debate.

Thanks to the course attendance, after passing the exam, the student acquires an advanced knowledge on many issues and on a variety of tools which can be fruitfully applied in a large number of professional fields in the public and economic sector. In particular, students will be able to prepare economic reports and analyses paying attention to the policy implications, to analyze government data evaluating the main macroeconomic variables related to the role of the public sector into the economy. The understanding of most scientific – even recent – papers in public economics, both theoretical and empirical, will allow students to also draft serious pieces of research on these topics.

Educational objectives

Behavioral economics is an area of research that aims to combine the optimization approach typical of the economic sciences with insights from studies in psychology, thus allowing for a more realistic analysis of how individuals make their economic decisions when emotions, heterogeneous preferences and the possibility of making systematic errors are allowed for.
After a long struggle to establish itself as an independent branch within traditional economics, it is now one of the most productive areas of academic research. At least six of the Nobel Prizes in Economics awarded in the 21st century have been given to behavioral economists: Daniel Kahneman (2002), Vernon Smith (2002), Alvin Roth (2012), Richard Thaler (2017), Elinor Ostrom (2009), and Esther Duflo (2019), the latter being the only two women to receive such a prize.
Behavioral economics teaches us that good decisions often depend on the small details that make each person psychologically unique. Behavioral economics tells us that the world is complex, that not everyone processes information in the same way, and that our emotions matter in making economic choices. Thus, to find optimal solutions to complex problems, we must not only consider human heterogeneity, but we must also learn how other individuals react psychologically to our choices. These lessons are often derived from experiments in the laboratory. In fact, behavioral economics combines psychological intuition with experiments specifically designed to test whether our decisions and theories will work in the particular context in which we want to apply them. In this sense, behavioral economics is an empirical evidence-based approach to decision making.
In recent decades, economists have also begun to conduct experiments - in the laboratory and in the field - with the goal of testing the predictions of economic models, looking for behavioral regularities, formulating new theories capable of integrating behaviors not in line with traditional theories, and/or producing economic and social policy recommendations by testing new market mechanisms and/or refining existing ones.
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of experimentation in economics, with a look at its implications from a methodological perspective and from the perspective of integrating economics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology.
With the attending students, we will conduct a series of experiments in the CIMEO lab to allow them to test some of the most important theories among those learned during Microeconomics or Political Economy courses and to identify systematic deviations of choices during the experiment from the predictions of these theories.
The course also aims to show students how to implement economic experiments and the usefulness of these experiments in providing an interdisciplinary approach to economic choice analysis. In formulating the theoretical hypotheses to be tested during the experiment, the main reference theoretical models will be presented and analyzed. In analyzing the experimental data, the main statistical techniques characteristic of experimental economics ('experimetrics') will be presented.

Educational objectives

The course aims at developing at an intermediate/advanced level some of the most relevant topics recently discussed in labour and education economics theory, within the competing macroeconomic paradigms. Students who pass the exam will be able to discuss and understand the consequences of the major Policies relating to employment and education.

SKILLS ACHIEVED:

Students who pass the exam will be able to read and understand scientific articles relating to education and employment.

Educational objectives

The course aims to provide students the theoretical, methodological and practical tools needed to understand the spatial and geographical organization of the economy. It will focus on the most recent advancements in the field of economic geography about the following themes: regional development and regional inequality; the logic and geography of firms’ location; the spatiality of local and global economic networks; the relation between innovation, technology and geographical space; business clusters and learning regions; the economic geography of cities; economic policies and space. The course will include seminars and workshops. In the workshops, students will learn how to use geographical information systems, how to manage and analyze spatial data and to produce thematic maps.

Educational objectives

The course is mainly designed to provide students with a knowledge of the most important problems involved in the European economic integration process. In particular, students should gain an ability to understand:
- the main factors explaining economic performance of the EU in terms of macroeconomic stability, cohesion and growth;
- the threat to the sustainability of the ‘European model’ coming from developments in demography, technological progress and globalization;
- the implications of the EU enlargement for both the old Member States and the new ones.
- Acquired knowledge is mainly finalized to give a student the skill to understand the targets, the content and the effects of the economic policy decisions undertaken at different levels by EU policy makers. Such skill is mainly functional to those who aim to operate successfully:
- - within EU institutions;
- - within government institutions and economic research centres;
- - within companies and firms operating in an international sphere

Educational objectives

The course is divided into a module that includes lectures and activities of working groups consisting in the preparation of presentation, analysis and discussion of articles, essays and books and processing of data sets and the use of historical series that contribute to forming the skills of the student. The latter will be able to apply the acquired knowledge in a concrete way, so as to favor independent judgment and refine problem solving skills.
Specifically, the student will know:
 Understand theories of change and the transformation of an economic system in the long term;
 Apply the knowledge acquired on the economic system in reference to the different national and international models;
 Communicate and implement the skills acquired in the concrete analysis of case studies;
 To pursue and develop, in an autonomous manner, the tools of analysis and comparison in the course of one's professional life in order to have a critical attitude towards the variety and dynamics of the development models.
 The role and the socio-economic impact of the institutions

These objectives are achieved starting from a clear definition of the economic system that represents the system of customs, rules and rules. During the course, study cases related to particular regional areas will be analyzed: Europe (Italy, Germany, England, France, Spain) United States, China, Japan, India, Russia and Asia.
During the course the aspects related to the relationship between the regional context and the global one will be explored; in this perspective the differences between the Civil Law, the Common Law and, above all, the mechanisms of the Path Dependance will be explored. The course will then focus on some topics: international migration; economic crises; inequalities in the long run.

In order to develop critical and judgmental skills and consequently make students able to master economic development models, the course will refer to techniques and tools able to promote learning and knowledge; in this direction during the course some activities will take place, such as:
 Exercises of a theoretical and practical nature on the issues dealt with during the course;
 Presentation of cases studies and related written reports, also with the support of external testimonials;
 Testimonies of eminent scholars in the socio-economic field;
 Group work consisting of project work presentations and discussion of papers

At the end of the course the student will have a good knowledge of the global socio-economic context and its implications in the various historical periods. The student will be able to know and interpret critically the different models of development. Therefore, the student will be able to contribute critically and with his own operational capacity to economic analysis

Educational objectives

The course provides a summary of the main concepts and techniques required to study advanced topics in Dynamic Macroeconomics. Specifically, the course will focus on: (a) Consumption, Investment and Savings; (b) topics in Growth Theory; (c) Public Debt dynamics and Fiscal Policy. The course pays particular attention to the development of the main methodological tools to study log-term economic phenomena, and presents an overview of the most important advanced models of modern macroeconomics, particularly the Solow-Swan and Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans models of exogenous growth, and the Samualson-Diamond model with overlapping generations. The aim of the course is to provide key mathematical techniques to study economic dynamics, and to solve dynamic optimization problems in both continuous and discrete time. Lecture notes and problem sets will be provided throughout the course. All necessary material will be made available on the web page of the course:
https://sites.google.com/a/uniroma1.it/macrodynamics/

To acquire knowledge and comprehension for: (a) The dynamic nature of economic decisions; (b) Introducing dynamics in standard intermediate macro-models (e.g the IS-LM and AD-AS models); (c) Solving dynamic consumption-savings problems; (d) Solving general-equilibrium models and comparing them to the first-best Pareto allocation (planner's problem); (e) linearizing nonlinear models; (f) Solving overlapping-generations models.

Educational objectives

This course aims to introduce the students to the main notions of financial economics at an advanced level. We will focus on the major models of portfolio and financial choice using a large variety of notions from economics and finance. Many empirical applications will be discussed, with emphasis on financial economics issues.

Having attended and sat the exam, the students will have a solid knowledge of portfolio theory, as well as of asset price theories. Moreover, they will be knowledgeable on speculative bubbles, and on puzzles and anomalies extensively studied in financial economics.

Thanks to the course attendance, after passing the exam the student acquires an advanced knowledge on which can be fruitfully applied in a large number of professional contexts in the financial and banking sector. The student will be able to undertake empirical analysis aimed at testing various finance models and drafting financial reports.

Educational objectives

Students successfully completing the course's exams (written essay and oral examination) are introduced to the the theoretical and empirical aspects supporting the main techniques of structural macroeconomic analysis and policy evaluation. In particular, students will be introduced to simultaneous equation models (SEMs), structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGEMs). Identification, estimation and simulation issues will be part of the learning outcome.

SKILLS ACHIEVED:

Students successfully completing the course's exams (written essay and oral examination) are expected to be competent in building, estimating and simulating SEMs, SVARs and small scale DSGE models. This requires students to be competent also in basic econometric modelling and time series methods, in general equilibrium dynamic modelling, optimization methods, numerical solution and integration methods. These competences will be applied by using standard econometric and math softwares.

Educational objectives

The aims of this course are to provide an introduction to the methods of quantitative economic history together with a review of some major findings of historical research of interest to economists. Even though the course is designed in European perspective, the global economy is taken into account for comparison.

Educational objectives

Students that will successfully pass the exam on Economics of Inequality fully understand issues related to measuring and defining economic inequalities and know main theories which try to explain their trend. In addition they will fully understand welfare system models, in particular pension systems, and will be able to evaluate how State and market can achieve many objectives in terms of equity and efficiency. In addition, they will know the characteristics of pension systems and the link between income distribution and standard of living. Such knowledge is extremely useful both for those people who want to continue studying economics within the academia and for those students who want to enter the labour market in the social field and or in research centres.

SKILLS ACHIEVED:

Students that will successfully pass the exam on Economics of Inequality will be able to measure and assess trends and determinants of income distribution. Further, they will be able to analyse welfare systems and distributive effects of different policies. Hence they will fully comprehend ongoing debate on economic inequalities and on welfare state policies and they will be able to read and understand official documents provided by various economic institutions and scientific papers dealing with welfare state systems.

Educational objectives

This course is designed to help students to achieve a solid grasp of the theory of public finance by applying the tools of microeconomics. The course trains students in areas relevant to the needs of business and government's institutions.
Having taken the course, the students are expected to know about: the theories of collective decision processes; market failures; interest group, bureaucracy and rent seeking; fiscal constitution and public budgetary process; analysis of public expenditures; theories of taxation; deficit financing and public debt cost-benefit analysis.

SKILLS ACHIEVED:

The skills acquired will allow the student to deeply understand relevant economic, political, and institutional issues, not only from a national point of view, but also in connection with international reality.

Educational objectives

The course aims at introducing students to the recent debate on the theory of monetary policy. To this end, students learn the concepts, methodologies and analytical tools which are necessary to understand the advanced theoretical models on the subject matter. Special attention is devoted to the analysis of dynamical system, to the methods of expectation formation and to the foundations of game theory. Based on these conceptual and analytical elements, the course pursues the general objective of deepening the main theoretical issues which contributed to design the monetary policy regimes actually realised in the last decades. In this way, the course allows students to understand the current debate on the accomplished realizations and on the limits encountered by the central banks of the main industrialized countries. This requires to devote a specific part of the course to the theoretical models recently employed to identify the optimal behaviour of central banks. In this way, the course offers students the possibility to learn both advanced theoretical notions, which are useful to understand the real economic world and which are necessary for those who wish to continue the study of economics, and the actual behaviour of monetary authorities, of particular relevance for those who are interested in monetary and financial issues and wish to enter the labor market after the Laurea. The acquisition of all the tools that are necessary to achieve the teaching targets is guaranteed by specific sections of the program.

Students passing the exam know at an upper intermediate level the most recent theory of monetary policy and they understand the most recent theoretical models underlying the behavior of the central banks of the main industrialized countries. They possess the advanced mathematical and economic tools required by this task and have a particularly good knowledge of game theory and economic dynamics. They understand the problems introduced into monetary economic modelling by the presence of multiplicative uncertainty. Specific knowledge refers to both New Classical and New Keynesian theorizing in monetary policy, to the design of constraints on central banking and to the problem of transparency in monetary policy. The simulation of dynamical economic systems is known at an introductory level.

Students passing the exam are able to understand the current debate on the theory of monetary policy and to read without any problem National and International reports on central banking by private and public institutions (starting from the monthly bulletins and the annual reports by central banks, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the other main international institutions). They read without difficulties scientific papers on the studied topics at an upper intermediate level. They are also able to construct upper intermediate models employing game theory and dynamic optimisation methods. They can simulate the response of economic variable to shocks in basic dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models by use of the Dynare freeware software. Finally, they can understand the motivations underlying the actual choices of central banks and to derive their effects on the (current and expected) main economic variables.

Educational objectives

ENGLISH:

The course seeks to introduce students to the study of policy evaluation at an advanced level. The main objective is to provide students with the skills and competencies for professionally dealing with impact evaluation of economic policies and programs. This objective will be pursued through a careful coverage of the state-of-the-art analytical techniques for economic policy evaluation as well as through an empirical and “hands-on” approach to the analysis of specific policies and programs, which have been implemented in real world.

Achieved knowledge

We therefore focus on methodological tools but great emphasis will be placed on empirical evidence obtained though economic data. This will allow students to combine a deep knowledge of both the methods of economic policy evaluation and the way to actually apply those methods to a real policy intervention.

Acquired Skills

In general, students will acquire knowledge and skills pertaining to the following aspects: a) characterization of the policy framework, that is policy maker’s objectives and program beneficiaries; b) selection of the most proper approach for assessing the economic impact of a specific policy/program; c) the application of such tool to the issue at hand.

After passing the exam, students will become familiar with the theory and practice of evaluating the impact of a public policy. In particular, they will be able to know how to design and conduct a policy evaluation analysis. This will allow them to actively participate to policy assessment analyses

Educational objectives

The aims of this course are to provide an introduction to the methods of quantitative economic history together with a review of some major findings of historical research of interest to economists. Even though the course is designed in European perspective, the global economy is taken into account for comparison.

Educational objectives

KNOWLEDGE ACHIEVED:

Students will learn about the theoretical and methodological background needed to understand the spatial and geographical organization of the economy. In particular, students will focus on the most interesting spatial economics issues: regional growth and development; firm location; stages of urbanization and the role of cities in a globalized world; globalization and competitiveness; policies and plans for territorial development. This work will enable students to have an integrated spatial dimension of economics.

SKILLS ACHIEVED:

The theoretical and methodological background to understand the spatial and geographical organization of the economy will enable students to have an integrated spatial dimension of economics.

Educational objectives

The course is mainly based on the socio-political processes of analysis of national and European competition and regulatory legislation. Furthermore, an in-depth examination of the control and regulation legal systems will be granted by through the study of many case law, in particular the provisions of services of general economic interests. At the end of the course, students will achieve a critical knowledge about the legal aspects related to the evolution and organization of markets and also the economic relationship between economic operators.