In this course, students learn about the most influential theories on the determinants of socio-economic development and their underlying notions of 'progress' and 'the good life'. A particular focus is on the discussion of common patterns of argumentation on the relationship between 'development', 'economic growth' and 'planetary boundaries'. In addition, the importance of international development organizations - in particular the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO - in the 20th and 21st centuries is critically discussed. Post-colonial critiques of the concept of 'development' and the practice of development assistance are also considered and themselves critically discussed.

The course covers a broad range of interactions between the environment and socio-economic development. Students are introduced to different methodologies to analyze economic influences on the environment, the relevance of the environment for economic activities, and the role of social institutions in the context of economy-environment relations. In this context, students learn about different policy instruments that can be used to address (undesired) external effects of economic activities on the environment, and how the effectiveness of environmental regulations can be examined from an economics point of view.

This seminar deepens the contents of the lecture "Development Economics". We deal with current controversies around the concept of "development" and around the meaning of economic growth as a driver of 'development'. Current debates on the effects of (de)globalization trends, development aid and ecologically sustainable growth strategies will also be addressed. The goal is to form one's own opinion on these topics based on one's own theoretical considerations and consultation of empirical data. Therefore, we also deal with different paradigms of current development research and their different theoretical and methodological approaches.

Students learn core elements of data scientific work and learn to independently develop and execute strategies for solving data science problems using the R and Quarto programming languages and the R-Studio development environment. Specifically, students will learn to prepare raw data ('data wrangling'), visualize and analyze data using basic statistical techniques, and publish their results in the form of reproducible reports.
You should bring your own laptop for this course. The course contains various blended-learning elements and draws on the department's published instructional video collection on empirical research with R.

Students are introduced to foundational concepts in the philosophy of science, particularly the deductive-nomological model and its critique, the major theories of paradigms and research programs, and central theories of the function and relevance of scientific models for knowledge discovery. Special attention will be given to the concepts of 'pluralism' and 'plurality' as well as the advantages and disadvantages of a pluralist research approach. In this context, post-colonial and feminist critiques of the current scientific system will also be taken into account. The core of the seminar is then to distinguish central economic paradigms and their central theoretical categories and methodological approaches from each other and to use current examples to understand how differences lead to different problem diagnoses and policy proposals.

Students learn to explain their research interest and develop a suitable quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods research design. The course covers fundamental concepts from the philosophy of science relevant to research and work practice. Starting from their research design, students will learn to independently write research reports that meet the requirements for scientific work. During the course we will learn about the distinctive features of quantitative and qualitative economic research designs and discuss their respective advantages and disadvantages. Students will also introduced to the idea of a pluralist research strategy and its associated opportunities and risks.

In the more technical dimension, students learn about different types of data acquisition, e.g. laboratory experiments, interviews, surveys and indicator building, and are able to read, prepare, visualize and explore both qualitative and quantitative data using the software R. The latter is introduced using flipped-classroom exercises referring to the collection of materials for empirical research with R that is curated by the department.

Using the R programming language and the R-Studio development environment, students learn to perform all central steps of quantitative economic research. This includes (i) data collection and processing ('data wrangling'), (ii) data visualization and exploratory data analysis, (iii) data modeling, and (iv) communication of results in the form of reproducible research reports produced with Quarto. Starting with a specific research question, students will learn to develop a quantitative research design and implement the necessary steps independently in R.

In the area of modeling, students will learn to implement and understand both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods in R. In the area of data visualization, students learn central theoretical concepts as well as the tools to create publishable images. In addition, they will learn the theories underlying the most common estimation methods and how to investigate their most important properties using Monte Carlo simulations and evaluate the methods accordingly.

The goal of the seminar is to analyze selected phenomena and problems of contemporary societies from a political-economic perspective. Thereby, a special focus will be put on the question which role the theoretical and methodological starting perspective plays in the problem diagnosis. More precisely, the first step is to learn about central concepts of the philosophy of science, which enables us to trace the genesis of different problem diagnoses back to the theories, methods or data used by the scientists or their normative basic attitudes. Subsequently, different political-economic problem diagnoses will be discussed comparatively on the basis of various application examples from the subject areas "International Development and Inequality" and "Ecological Crises and Economic Growth". In the process, the students' own normative starting points will be deliberately reflected upon.

The course covers a broad range of interactions between the environment and socio-economic development. Students are introduced to different methodologies to analyze economic influences on the environment, the relevance of the environment for economic activities, and the role of social institutions in the context of economy-environment relations. In this context, students learn about different policy instruments that can be used to address (undesired) external effects of economic activities on the environment, and how the effectiveness of environmental regulations can be examined from an economics point of view.

The Research Atelier is part of the ICES Research School and meant to serve as a platform where early-stage researchers (i.e. PhD students, Post-Docs and Junior Professors) get constructive feedback on their work. The idea is that participants present some of their work and we then enter a joint discussion. Presentations are not necessarily about final and full-fledged papers. To the contrary, everyone is invited to present ongoing work and receive feedback on open questions during the Atelier. Participants form an interdisciplinary group, so presenters are expected to clarify disciplinary specificities and terms of their work. If you are interested in participating, or you have not yet received an invitation to Basecamp, which we use for organisational issues, please contact Claudius via email. More information can also be found at the ICES website.