Courses
Political Economy (Politik und Wirtschaft)
The course offers an introduction to modern political economy and explains the causes of consequences of globally interconnected states and markets. Based on a solid microfoundation, the course allows students to understand how political forces affect the choice of economic policies, especially as to distributional conflicts and political institutions.
political economy 2020 version
2022 version in preparation
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Advanced Regression Analysis for the Social Sciences
The course discusses the logic and practice (and problems) of regression analysis -- OLS, MLE, model specification, identification, and techniques for causal inference. Part 1 discusses estimators and model specification, part 2 deals with techniques which aim at improving the validity of inferences.
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Robustness Testing
The course introduces the logic of robustness testing based on the book project with Eric Neumayer. The course, firstly, develops the foundations of robustness, the causes and consequences of model uncertainty, the alternatives to robustness testing and their shortcomings, and the limits of robustness testing. It, secondly, goes in detail through all dimensions of modeling uncertainty, starting with population uncertainty, inclusion and exclusion of variables, concept and measurement uncertainty. In the third part, we discuss
uncertainties about specification issue such as functional forms, conditionality, dynamics, spatial dependence. The final section considers technologies for model averaging.
robustness slides
Publishing in Academic Journals
I taught this short course at various universities and occasions. It is based on the rather obvious assumption that when writing up research, form should follow function. This leaves little degrees of freedom for academic tests. The course has a main message: academic writing is communication.