Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
Recitations: 1 session / week, 1 hour / session
Prerequisites
This class contributes to the fulfillment of requirements for the Development field for Economics Ph.D. students at MIT. Students should have taken or be concurrently taking:
14.121 Microeconomic Theory I
Requirements
The grade will be based on:
- Class participation
- Three problem sets
- Mid-term exam
- Research proposal
Problem Sets
Two problem sets will cover theoretical and empirical problems related to papers discussed in class. One problem set will consist of an empirical exercise that will extend material covered in class.
Research Proposal
The research proposal should consist of a research strategy to address questions that came up during the class. Ideally such proposals could lead to a third year paper. We will discuss the proposals during the last lecture of the class. We plan to have three or four students presenting their proposals. All research proposals are due in the last lecture.
Development / Macro Seminar
The students in this class were encouraged to attend the Development seminar or the Macro seminar on MIT's campus. The following topics were covered:
- Micro-founded macro models
- Models with limited commitment
- Beyond limited commitment: Adverse selection, moral hazard, and their interaction
- Measurement: Financial accounts; household to national levels
- Risk-sharing and targeting
- Finance, CAPM
- Links to the macro literature: Incomplete markets
- Labor: Intensive / extensive and aggregation
- Explicit barriers and obstacles
- Program evaluation
- Expanding financial service and impact: Reduced form to structural method