02.08.-06.08.	Recent Developments in Mechanism Design	Prof. Stephen Morris
09.08.-13.08.	New Dynamic Public Finance	Prof. Ivan Werning
16.08.-20.08.	Behavioral Finance	Prof. Harrison Hong
23.08.-27.08.	Program Evaluation Methods	Prof. Guido Imbens

 

 

  

The course will provide a brief introduction to the foundations of mechanism design.  Topics of recent research will be reviewed.   Among these will be: (1) robust mechanism design, identifying mechanisms that rely on fewer assumptions about the designer’s beliefs and knowledge and the beliefs and higher order beliefs of the agents; (2) dynamic mechanism design, extending classic result to dynamic environments; (3) work on the boundaries of economics and computer science looking at belief-free mechanisms and examining computation constraints.

 

This course covers recent advances in public finance, with special focus on the theory of optimal taxation and social insurance. Among the topics we will consider are: (1) optimal tax and debt finance when the economy experiences aggregate fluctuations; (2) non-linear taxation of labor income using a Pareto efficient perspective; (3) theories of capital and inheritance taxation, covering both implicit wedges and explicit tax implementations; (4) political economy considerations, mixing the normative with the positive; (5) social insurance and inequality, especially the optimal design of unemployment insurance.

 

This course covers recent advances in the field of behavioral finance, with particular attention to the economics of speculative bubbles and financial crises.  Part I analyzes the effects of increasing I.Q. in financial markets on asset prices and the potentially destabilizing influence of sophisticated arbitrageurs.  Part II focuses on the consequences of classic agency conflicts such as short-termism and career concerns for risk-taking and their roles in the recent banking crisis.  Part III presents a model based on disagreement (or divergence of opinion) among investors and short-sales constraints that can account for key stylized facts related to trading volume and asset price bubble dynamics.  Part IV then extends this model to allow for a collateral lending market and considers the impact of leverage on asset price dynamics, especially in the context of housing. Part V examines the role of social influences in magnifying bubbles and crises.  Finally, Part VI describes how asset price bubbles affect corporate policies and distort real investment and consumption.

 

The course will discuss methods for causal inference. We will start with the potential outcome perspective where causal effects are viewed as comparisons of outcomes under different regimes or treatments. First we discuss methods for analyzing randomized experiments, including Fishers method for calculating exact p-values and Neyman's repeated sampling perspective. Then we analyze observational studies under unconfoundedness.  We discuss matching methods and the role of the propensity score. Next we discuss observational studies with irregular assignment mechanisms, including instrumental variables, difference in differences methods, and regression discontinuity designs. The class will closely follow the manuscript by Imbens and Rubin, "causal inference in the social sciences".

 

 

Professor Stephen Morris is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics at Princeton University.   A native of the United Kingdom, his undergraduate degree is from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and his Ph.D. is from Yale University in 1991.  He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University.  His research has focused on foundational game theory and applications to finance, macroeconomics and international finance.  He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and current serves as editor of Econometrica. 

 

Professor Ivan Werning is  Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and  is also a research associate at NBER. He obtained his M.A. in Economics, at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His research interests include Macroeconomics, Public Economics, Applications of Dynamic Contracts, Optimal Taxation, Monetary Policy, Unemployment Insurance Design.

 

Professor Harrison Hong is the John Scully ’66 Professor of Economics and Finance at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in finance in the undergraduate, master and Ph.D. programs.  Before joining Princeton in 2002, he was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  He received his B.A. in economics and statistics with highest distinction from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1997.  His research has covered such topics as: behavioral finance and stock market efficiency; asset pricing and trading under market imperfections; incentives and biases in decision making; organizational form and performance; and social interaction and markets.  He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Intermediation.  He is a Director of the American Finance Association and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2009, he was awarded the American Finance Association’s Fischer Black Prize, given biennially to the person under 40 who has contributed the most to the theory and practice of finance.

 

Professor Guido Imbens is Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his PhD in Economics from Brown University in 1991. In addition to Harvard he has been on the faculty at UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley. He has also taught short courses for the American Economic Association, the Canadian Economic Association, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and many universities in the US and abroad. Imbens teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in econometrics. His research interests focus on methods for causal inference, including matching methods, instrumental variables, difference in differences methods and regression discontinuity designs.

  

The following pdf-files contain information on the program fee as well as the application procedure and the admissions process.

• Administrative information
• Application form

Susanne Senn or Teodora Ruiz
Administrative Manager Doctoral Program

Phone: +41 31 780 31 03

Fax:     +41 31 780 31 00

 

Studienzentrum Gerzensee, Dorfstr. 2, CH-3115 Gerzensee, Switzerland