Courses

This course offers an introduction to the ongoing debates about the determinants of long run development, about the reasons for world inequality, and about the perspectives for growth in the future. The course will discuss topics related to the dynamics of long-run growth from a theoretical and empirical perspective and will be structured as follows:
i) a lecture part, which will familiarize students with background and methods;
ii) a tutorial part, which is devoted to the discussion of topical questions and related papers.
Outline:
The course will focus on recent contributions to unified theories of demographic, institutional, and economic dynamics well as empirical investigations of implications of these models. The aim is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the topic.

The tentative syllabus is as follows:
1. Background and Empirical Facts
2. The Role of Demographics: Malthusian Models
3. Fertility and the Quantity-Quality Trade-off
4. Unified Growth Theory
5. Long-Run Growth and Comparative Development
6. Institutional Development: Democracy
7. Institutional Development: Rule of Law
8. The Bigger Picture

The target groups are master and PhD students interested in long-run development. The aim is to familiarize students with reading and discussing recent research papers, to expose them to influential contributions in the field and to help them develop their own research ideas.

Digitaler Kursraum zur Wiederholungsübung der Finanzwissenschaft & Wirtschaftspolitik im Wintersemester 2021/22

Die Mikroökonomik beschäftigt sich damit, das wirtschaftliche Verhalten von Haushalten und Unternehmen zu analysieren und die Funktionsweise von Märkten (und anderen Institutionen), in denen Haushalte und Unternehmen interagieren, zu erklären. Die Vorlesung führt in die Grundlagen des Faches ein, gibt einen Überblick über weitergehende Themen, die in anderen Vorlesungen vertieft werden, und soll Ihr Interesse an Fragen der Wirtschaftswissenschaft wecken.

Concerns about image have been examined in theoretical and empirical work spanning a range of different literatures in economics, including signaling (Spence 1973), identity (Akerlof and Kranton 2000, 2010), norms (Benabou and Tirole 2011, Acemoglu and Jackson 2017), status goods (Veblen 1899, Frank 1985, Leibenstein 1950, Bagwell and Bernheim 1996), conformity (Bernheim 1994), motives for pro-social (Benabou and Tirole 2006, Dana, Weber, and Kuang 2007) and (dis)honest behavior (Gneezy, Kajackaite, and Sobel 2018, Abeler, Nosenzo, and Raymond 2019). In this seminar, we will discuss their empirical relevance by studying evidence from economic laboratory and field experiments. We will ask, whether people prefer to be (or be seen) as fair, honest or prosocial and discuss the role of self- or social image concerns more broadly. For example, we will analyze whether people willfully ignore facts to uphold positive self-image. Finally, we will ask whether image concerns may be exploited to achieve behavioral change, and under which conditions image concerns may restrict the use of classical incentives.

The course provides an overview of opportunities and challenges created by the “knowledge economy” for firms. The course covers the following topics:

1. Skill-biased technological change and its impact on firms’ labor demand
2. Management practices and the organization of knowledge
3. Data as assets
4. Intangible assets, internationalization and profit shifting
5. Incentives to innovate for firms, and within firms, for employees
6. Knowledge diffusion and knowledge spillovers between firms

At the end of the course, students should have a good understanding of how technological change has affected production in firms, be able to understand empirical papers in the field, and know how to critically evaluate them.

Internationale Wirtschaftsbeziehungen