Economic Development and Policy Analysis

This module covers a series of topics in economic policy. The first part looks at policies relating to growth, technology, investment and exporting/trade. The second part covers international economic policies and institutions including:

• policy transfer
• macroeconomic policy (IMF)
• development (World Bank)
• aid
• capital flows

This module covers empirical models of international trade and several topics in trade policy. It discusses firms’ decision to export; the evaluation of export promotion policies; the link between globalisation and labour markets; the gravity model of international trade; free trade agreements; multinational firms; the political economy of trade policy.

This module covers foundations of consumer theory, decision-making under risk, elements of the theory of imperfect competition, and incomplete information in markets.

We start by laying the foundations of macroeconomic models with the use of very stylised one and two-period models in which consumers, firms and governments interact in the goods and factor markets. We will discuss how to solve macroeconomic models in the computer with the aid of these simple economies.

We next move to study the determinants of long-run economic growth. The overarching question that we will study is: why are some countries so much richer than others? We will study several mechanisms that can potentially account for these differences, namely, capital accumulation, knowledge production and institutions. This section does not seek to be an exhaustive survey of models of economic growth; it intends to highlight the mechanisms at play in a broad class of models. We will also place a strong emphasis on how to take the predictions derived from these models to the data.

In the last section of the module, we turn our attention towards the ‘short run’. We will embed the consumption and labour supply decision studied at the beginning of the semester into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the macroeconomy, the standard real business cycle (RBC) model developed by Kydland and Prescott. We will study the investment decision of firms, and close the module by studying the search and matching model of unemployment of Mortensen and Pissarides.

This module provides you with 'hands on' training in the use, presentation and interpretation of economic data, including time series, cross-section and panel data. It comprises of:

• an introduction to basic principles of economic data analysis
• descriptive statistics
• hypothesis testing
• simple and multiple regression
• introduction to panel data
• introduction to dynamic modelling
• time series models

The module will include a series of practical classes using econometrics software packages.