Further Electives
Electives are courses designed to equip students with supplementary methodological skills, such as statistics and econometrics, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives on topics at the intersection of economics and fields such as psychology or philosophy.
The following is an indicative list inlcuding the courses offered in the last two years. Not all courses are necessarily offered every academic year; and the program may be enriched with further courses when appropriate and feasible.
See all courses offered in current and former semesters in the online course catalogue QIS.
Economics and ethics stand in stark contrast according to folk wisdom. From a scholarly perspective, however, they are closely related to each other and are complementary fields of academic enquiry. One main goal of the course is to bring these aspects to the fore by showing...
- ...that the market economy has distinctive ethical qualities that are often overlooked or misunderstood,
- ...that goals like mitigating global warming do not require degrowth but may be compatible with economic growth,
- ...that economics and ethics mesh well if considered from a game-theoretic perspective and allow us to foster and improve various aspects of social life.
- ...that economics and ethics are complementary sciences and how they can be differentiated systematically.
These various aspect at the intersection of economics and ethics will be revealed and analysed based on topical literature. Students are requested to read the relevant texts and discuss them in class.
Because of the growth of so many subdisciplines, it becomes increasingly difficult to perceive the unity of economic theory. The best way to understand the different orientations is to go to the roots and to study their origin in the history of the emergence of modern economic thought. The lecture course will start with the classical authors like Ricardo and Malthus, Say and Sismondi, up to Mill, Marx and some of their followers. Their opponents were the Historical school and neoclassical authors who were more diverse than is commonly thought (Jevons and Marshall, Walras and Pareto, Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, J.B. Clark). Schumpeter and the discoveries of the ”years of high theory” (Shackle) will lead to Keynes, postkeynesian authors and the neo-neoclassicals. Main themes will be: value and price, general equilibrium, growth and distribution, money, credit and the business cycle.
This hands-on computer-based course aims at students with no or limited programming experience. After an introduction to programming in general and R in particular, participants will have basic knowledge how to approach smaller programming projects. The larger second part will be a hands-on, self-guided, exercise-style course in which you will solve basic financial problems from the areas of portfolio selection, investment management, and asset pricing. Topics include multi-asset portfolio optimization with restrictions as well as Monte Carlo simulation for evaluating static and dynamic portfolio strategies. Students are expected to be familiar with the underlying fundamentals from finance.
This course discusses the application of stochastic processes. The focus is on processes in continuous time. At the end of the course students will have learnt how to construct stochastic integrals from Wiener processes (Brownian motions). In particular, Ito integrals and Ito’s Lemma are studied. Further, students will be able to solve stochastic differential equations which are used to model e.g. interest rate dynamics in mathematical finance.
