Projektkurs Volkswirtschaftslehre: let the computer do the calculations

• Due to health issues, there is no meeting on April 25. I will inform you as soon as I am better about a make up meeting.
• There is no meeting on April 11 as I am attending an international conference. We will have our first meeting on April 18.

• In week 1, we talk a bit about the course and try to install julia on your computer. Please note that you need to bring a notebook to class every week in order to be able to work. (It does not matter whether your operating system is Windows, MacOS, Linux or FreeBSD. However, tablets or phones with mobile operating systems like Android and iOS will not work.)
• A sample project description is available now.

Modern economics relies heavily on mathematical models. Solving these models by hand is usually burdensome and often outright infeasible. In these cases, computers can be used to analyse and solve economic models numerically. This project course gives an introduction to solving models numerically with the help of the computer. It is suitable for students with no (or little) prior knowledge of numerical analysis and/or programming.

The first part of the course gives an introduction to programming using the programming language "julia". The second part shows how to use julia to do numerical analysis (solving equations, maximizing functions, creating plots etc.). In the third part, students undertake a small project in which they use the skills acquired in the first two parts.

Students are asked to watch video tutorials (part 1) or "notebooks" (part 2) at home. In class questions on these are answered and students work on small exercises.

The skills acquired in this course will be particularly useful for writing term papers or a thesis but are also valued on the job market.

Time and place: Thursdays 10:00-11:30, Mensa building, 118/03/3.03

Grading: The grade is based on three elements: First, a "julia cheat sheet" which is a document in which you write down the julia commands and functions you have learned together with a brief description of what they do or an example. Second, a jupyter notebook with solutions to the exercises. You will work on this during class. Third, your project which will be presented in class and handed in as a jupyter notebook.

The following plan might be adapted over the course of the semester. I use the following abbreviations:

• jpfnb: "Julia Programming for Nervous Beginners"

• jfmt: "Julia for micro theory"

  Week	content	to do before next week's class
  1	info, installing julia, jupyter notebooks	"week 1" of jpfnb
  2	strings, data containers	"week 2" of jpfnb
  3	numbers, functions	"week 3" of jpfnb
  4	loops, if/else	"week 4" of jpfnb, notebooks 0-2 jfmt
  5	plotting and maximizing functions, interact.jl	notebooks 3,4,6,7 jfmt
  6	equation solving, multivariate maximization	notebook 8 jfmt, notebooks data (skip sections 3.3, 4.3,4.5-4.7)
  7	data and statistics	notebooks on hypothesis testing (only sections 1 and 2) and on regressions
  8	OLS	notebook 5 jfmt
  9	some applications
  10	project work
  11	project work
  12	project presentations