First-year students will be offered CRASH COURSES IN MATHEMATICS, ECONOMICS AND ECONOMETRICS in order to acquire the basic tools and pre-requisites needed to successfully attend the RESD programme. These courses are fully integrated into the official timetable, although no credits will be awarded.
Course Content
I. Introduction to Economics (30 hours, first term)
Professor Riccardo Pesci
Microeconomics
- Demand, Supply and Market Equilibrium
- Consumers' choice and Utility Maximisation
- Demand function and Elasticity
- Firms' choice, Production Costs and Profit Maximisation
- Perfect Competition, Monopoly and Market Structure
Macroeconomics
- GDP, Inflation and Unemployment
- Money and Inflation
- Economic Growth (Solow, Endogenous Growth, Overlapping Generations)
- Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply
- ISLM, Fiscal Policy and Monetary Policy
II. Introduction to Mathematics (30 hours, first term)
Professor Azzedine Atrass
At the end of the course the student knows the basic mathematical concepts and techniques that are of central importance for modern economic analysis. In particular, the student is able to apply fruitfully standard tools and concepts from differential calculus, such as the implicit function theorem and static optimization; handle the matrix notation and apply linear algebra techniques to the representation and the solution of standard problems from economic theory.
III. Introduction to Econometrics (30 hours, second term)
This course introduces students to linear regression models. It reviews the main theoretical properties of least squares estimation, testing of the parameters under the Gauss-Markov assumptions and discusses the violation of classical assumptions; it provides an introduction to no linear least square and maximum likelihood estimation, and discusses some empirical examples in various fields using the econometric software Stata and EViews.
