20298 - POLITICAL ECONOMICS - ADVANCED
Department of Economics
GIAMPAOLO LECCE
Prerequisites
Mission & Content Summary
MISSION
CONTENT SUMMARY
- Electoral competition and redistribution in advanced democracies - Political corruption.
- Bargaining in legislatures.
- Comparative politics and fiscal policy.
- Democracy and economic development.
- State capacity: how it historically evolves and why.
- Culture and institutions in economic development from a contemporaneous and historical perspective.
Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO)
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
- Understand how policy decisions are made in representative democracies.
- Understand deep and historical determinants of economic and political development.
- Read and understand the advanced literature on economic development and public policy.
APPLYING KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
- Forecast policy decisions in complex political environments.
- Understand ongoing political and economic changes in advanced democracies and emerging countries.
- Understand why unsustainable policies remain in place for too long.
- Understand which specific features of political institutions may lead to more or less provision of public goods, more or less redistribution, more or less political corruption.
- Understand how organized special interests influence public policies.
Teaching methods
- Face-to-face lectures
- Exercises (exercises, database, software etc.)
- Individual assignments
DETAILS
The learning experience of this course includes, in addition to face-to-face lectures, the solution in class of Problem Sets assigned to students throughout the course. Those exercises allow students to apply the analytical tools illustrated during the course. Students are encouraged to bring their own views and to share their insights.
Assessment methods
Continuous assessment | Partial exams | General exam | |
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x | x | |
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x |
ATTENDING AND NOT ATTENDING STUDENTS
With the purpose of measuring the acquisition of the above-mentioned learning outcomes, the students’ assessment is based on two main components:
- Problem sets (2 points out of 30).
- Written exam (28 points out of 30).
The written exam consists of exercises and open questions aimed to assess students’ ability to apply the analytical tools illustrated during the course. The exam could also consist of short statements to discuss. Those statements are aimed to assess students’ ability to articulate economic reasoning. Students can take a partial written exam and complete the written exam at the end of the course. In this case the weight is split equally between the partial and the final exam. Alternatively, students can only take a final written exam.
Teaching materials
ATTENDING AND NOT ATTENDING STUDENTS
The main course material, for both attending and non-attending students, is:
- T. PERSSON, G. TABELLINI, Political Economics, MIT Press, 2000.
The slides of the course, problem sets and additional readings are uploaded to the Bboard platform of the course.