How to study Economics @ SILS

Before the beginning of every semester, junior and senior students have a chance to join a seminar. In this entry, I state basic policies and what to study in my seminar.（各セメスターの前に、三年生及び四年生はゼミに入れる機会があります。このエントリーでは、私のゼミ（石川ゼミ）がどのような形で進められ、何を勉強するのかをお話ししたいと思います。） In my seminar, you study economic theory or econometric analysis based on professional publications. When you join my seminar, I ask you what your interest is. Following your interest, I assign some technical papers related to your interest to each of you. （私のセミナーでは、専門論文を元に、経済理論もしくは計量経済分析を学びます。みなさんが私のゼミに入る時に、みなさんが何に興味を持っているのかを聞きます。その興味に沿って、専門論文をみなさんに割り当てます。） Your interest is not necessarily related with economics, Indeed, past students chose various topics such as sports, travel, Artificial intelligence, marketing and so on. This is because it is possible to analyze such topics in the framework of Economics.（みなさんの興味は必ずしも経済学である必要はありません。実際、過去の学生は、スポーツ・旅行・AI・マーケティングなど様々なトピックを選んでいます。なぜならば、これらのトピックを経済学の枠組みで分析するできるからです。） However,

Writing graduation thesis gives you the last chance to struggle with academic investigations if you do not go to any graduate school. Since your entrance of elementary school, you have studied parts of academic outcomes. Imagine basic arithmetic. It was a part of researches about 5000 years ago. Any subjects you studied in schools were a part of researches in the past. Now that you are a university student, you get great chances to study the frontier of any fields. So, if you do not look at front line of a field, you lose the chance to see evermore. I do not want you to lose the chance. So, all the students in my seminar are asked to read some technical articles published recently. This is because they are at the frontier of some fields. In particular, I recommend some papers published in top-ranked journals of fields. I know they are difficult to read. But, when you struggle with such articles during the last year of your university life, you will get valuable experiences you have

The students in my seminar are asked to present professional articles in order to write their theses. When you present an article/a paper, you should explain it as follows: What is the motivation & new finding: Basic Model: The main theorem/finding following the model: Conclusion or Final remarks. Any professional articles must include new findings. So, whenever you read them, you need to focus on what the new findings are, why they are important, & what the deferences from the previous works are. Usually those are explained in Introduction of each paper. However, even when you know them through introduction, it is just intuitive explanations. So after understanding the motivations, results, and the importance, you carefully read to know how to derive the results by the models and econometric analysis. In the above sense, even when you understand the importance of papers through Introduction, we do not usually say that you read the papers. So, when you prepare

I offer the class of Behavioral & Experimental Game Theory . The title is quite distinct. It looks like the mixture of  Behavioral and Experimental economics focusing on game theory if you know the fields. Basically it is right. However, since SILS does not offer so many subjects of economics and game theory and it is the intermediate level, I have a consciousness of being intermediate game theory, which means that students can learn the standard game theory through class experiments with some behavioral models explained below. Game theory is now the absolutely imperative theory to analyze economic phenomena. This is because economics and game theory have the common assumption that decision makers maximize their payoffs/utilities. In this sense, game theory can analyze economic phenomena from the same viewpoint as economics. In addition, game theory is applicable to the situations without markets that economics of a decade ago focused on. By applying game theory, economics expa

SILS offers some subjects in Economics. The subjects opened in 2017 are listed in the bottom. As emphasized before, Economics basically consists of Micro & Macro economic theory and Econometrics. And, if you decide to study economics, you should step the introduction level to study effectively. Unfortunately, SILS does not offer econometrics in intermediate level. You should study it for yourself. Since Econometrics uses some math & statistics, it may be good to join Quantitative method for Economics though it is introduction level. After that, the following textbooks are useful to study econometrics: 山本拓「 計量経済学 」日本評論社 J. H. Stock & M. W. Watson (著)  Introduction to Econometrics  (Pearson). I guess the latter is a little bit more difficult, but it is marginal. Recent development of econometrics enables us to examine causality relations among data. But this is advanced. Before studying it, you need study basic econometrics such as linear regressions. If you are i