Multidisciplinary Economics

Course goals

Learning objectives

The student gains deeper insight into economic decision-making, its role in economic growth and development, and how scientists across disciplines have contributed to understanding this process. Upon finishing this course, the student can:

• Put economic behaviour, growth and finance in a historical perspective;
• Appreciate interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary contributions of geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers to economic research;
• Describe the different theoretical and empirical problems that occur when analysing real world (economic) problems from a multidisciplinary perspective;
• Effectively collect and analyse relevant (new, additional) literature to answer key questions in building a (more or less) unified and micro founded theory of economic behaviour, growth and development;
• Critically evaluate and come up with alternative, creative and sensible solutions for the urgent real-world economic challenges we face today;
• Write for non-academic audiences in an accessible and scientifically responsible way about the topics of the course;
• Write such suggestions down in a convincing way in the limited space a newspaper will allow.

Content

Students who are not enrolled in the research master Multidisciplinary Economics should contact the course coordinator for enrollment in this course.

The purpose of this course is to show you why it is important to look beyond the borders of the economic discipline. This becomes obvious when we study real-world problems that typically cannot be studied, analysed and understood from a monodisciplinary perspective. In this course, we therefore address three real-world questions in economics. What drives individuals to do the things they do? Why are some countries rich and some poor? And what is the function and role of the financial system in our economy? By addressing these three big questions, we cover real-world issues that have been at the centre of the economic discipline since its beginning, and we examine microeconomics, macroeconomics, and financial economics. Most of the basic economics related to these questions is assumed to be known from your undergraduate studies. In this course, we show that other disciplines and research methods can usefully be applied to come to a richer understanding of the phenomena under study.


Intended Learning Outcomes
The graduate:

Knowledge

• has knowledge of multidisciplinary aspects of their own research specialisation

Skills

• can write an academic paper in English at the level of a publishable article in a peer-reviewed journal
• can collaborate in an international team, also with academics from other disciplines

Competencies

• can think in a logical way
• can summarise and identify common themes in the literature on a specific topic, and keep track of recent developments
• can critically appraise literature
• can identify innovative and well-delineated research questions
• can acquire and apply insights from other scientific disciplines
• can collaborate in an international team, including with scholars from other disciplines
• can contribute to the solution of open research questions
• can develop as an independent academic, formulating research questions, and answering them
• can make their own research relevant for society

Attitudes

• can critically reflect on own work, and critically reflect on the work of others in an appropriate way
• can defend their own research results, while being open to criticism

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.