KECD 2245 - COMPUTATIONAL ECONOMICS

In this course, you will learn about some commonly used methods in Computational Economics.
These methods are being used in all fields of Economics.
The course has a clear focus on applying what you learn.
We will cover the theoretical concepts that underlie each topic, but you should expect a fair amount of hands on action required on your behalf.

In the words of the great Che-Lin Su:
- Doing Computation is the only way to learn Computation.
- Doing Computation is the only way to learn Computation.
- Doing Computation is the only way to learn Computation.

True to that motto, there will be homeworks for you to try out what you learned in class.
There will also be a term paper. It will be helpful to bring a laptop to the sessions if you have one.

Axelle FERRIERE

Séminaire

English

You need a laptop.

You should be familiar with the material from Introduction to Programming taught in M1.

You must sign up for a free account at github.com. Choose a reasonable user name and upload a profile picture.

Before you come the first class, please do this:
- Download the latest stable julia release for your OS.
- Download the VSCode Editor

Spring 2025-2026

There will be homeworks. They will be listed within the Course Outline.

Your grade will be :
- 60% homeworks,
- 40% term project.

This year your term project will be to replicate a paper published in an economics journal.

Ideally this would be related to your field of interest.

The requirements for choice of paper to replicate are:

Published version and replication kit is available online.
The paper to replicate must not use julia.
You must use julia for your replication.
Ideally your choice will involve at least some level of computational interest (i.e. more than an IV regression)

However, you can replicate a paper with an IV regression, but you have to go all the way to get the exact same results as in the paper.
I.e. if the author typed the stata command ivreg2 lw s expr tenure rns smsa _I* (iq=med kww age), cluster(year) you will have to write (or find) julia code which will match all output from this, including standard errors. I do not recommend to do this.

You need to set up a public github repository where you will build a documentation website of your implementation. You'll learn how to do this in the course. I encourage you to let the world know about your replication effort via social media and/or email to the authors directly.
This is independent of whether you were able or not to replicate the results.
Replication is not about finding errors in other peoples' work. If you are able to replicate some result in julia, this may be very interesting for others.