With this initiative, the Department wishes to provide PhD students working in international economics in Switzerland an opportunity to interact and develop a community with their peers.
We offer courses in Development Economics*, International Trade and International Macro/Finance, which you can explore in the sliders below.
Students are welcome to take the course for ECTS credits or to participate as auditors.
If you are interested in one or more courses, please send a message to ei@graduateinstitute.ch.
*For the academic year 2023-24, no courses in Development Economics will be offered.
Paolo Cavallino - EI053 - Fall 2023
This course in structured in two parts that will run simultaneously. In the first part, I will provide a graduate-level treatment of the main models and solution methods used in international macroeconomics. Topics covered include: dynamic optimization in discrete and continuous time; small open economy models and linear solution methods; two-country models and higher order perturbation methods; global solution methods with application to sovereign default models and models with occasionally binding constraints. In the second part, students will present and discuss current papers on selected advanced topics in international macroeconomics. The topics will be determined partly by the interests of class participants. Sample topics are: international risk sharing; trade-macro linkages; sovereign debt and default; the macroeconomics of innovation; and emerging market business cycles.
Cedric Tille - EI063 - Spring 2024
This course provides a graduate-level treatment of research on international open economy macroeconnomics. It has an emphasis on recent developments, in order to help students identify research topics. Topi include: the rising extent of financial linkages; the associated 'valuation effects' of asset prices on countries' wealth, and drivers of international capital flows; the global financial cycle including whether the exchange rate regime can help absorb capital flows; international banking activity; the broadening of the policy toolbox to new instruments (international reserves, macroprudential policies, and capital controls); the low level of interest rates and the rising global demand for safe assets; the workhorse model of monetary policy design in open economies and the ways it has evolved since the global financial crisis; the dominant role of some currencies and its consequences; and recent topics, including the rise in inflation, the dynamics of public debt, Covid, digital currencies, and climate change. The first part of the course consists of lectures. The second part consists of presentations of papers from the reading list (with the option to propose a paper not on the list that you would be particularly interested in presenting).
Frédéric Robert-Nicoud & Grigorios Spanos - EI015 - Fall 2023
This course provides an advanced understanding of international trade theory. It emphasizes the latest class of models in the literature and their applications. It is devoted to discussing the underlying mechanisms of these models and of ways to extend them. This course is designed for PhD students.
Julia Cajal Grossi - EI066 - Spring 2024
This course covers a selection of advanced topics in international trade and development. In the first part of the course, we study the sources, implications and empirical patterns of heterogeneity across firms in international trade. Focusing on productivity heterogeneity, we will study approaches for estimating production function parameters, as well as supply-side approaches to recover heterogeneous markups. In the second part of the course, we will discuss demand-side heterogeneity, and study discrete-choice models for demand estimation. We will study models with demand-side driven heterogeneous markups. The final section of the course will focus on contracting between buyers and sellers in international trade, with a focus on trade in developing countries.
