How to study Economics @ SILS

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, econo...

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 ...

Economics consists of theory and economic data analysis. The former consists of Microeconomics & Macroeconomics, and the latter is econometrics. Microeconomics studies how to interact between consumers and firms. Before 1980s, the target was market institutions which give prices. Then, economists were interested in how both the consumers and firms make decisions when they observe prices as signals and how the prices are decided depending on market structure. However, since game theory developed after 1980, the theory succeeded in analyzing their decisions and behavior without prices. Then, the analysis by Game theory is parts of microeconomics now. SILS provides two classes of Microeconomics, Introduction level & Intermediate one. If you select to study economics, Introduction level is too easy. You directly join the class of Intermediate level of Microeconomics. And the following textbooks are recommended: H. Varian (2014)  Intermediate Microeconomics: A Modern App...

This blog gives a guide to study Economics in SILS, Waseda university. SILS gives you great chances to study several fields. On another front, if you'd like to select to study Economics, SILS offers only a few subjects of Economics. HOWEVER, your situation is not so awful because SILS provides basic classes of Economics such as Microeconomics & Macroeconomics. Since Economic principle is simple, and the theory is constructed logically and consistently from the simple principle. So, once you understand the principle and the logical deductions, it is not so difficult to study Economics regardless of your department. I'm happy if this blog helps you study Economics.