This course exceeded my expectations. I recommend that every undergraduate student attends this seminar. My personal goals were to learn to write empirical papers, work with data in the statistical software R and gain invaluable experience. Data Camp courses provided amazing first coding experience. A lot of work, challenges, but also the support of Marco and Writing Fellows. Inna (2020)
What this course is all about
In this seminar we try to answer apparently simple but intriguing questions from daily life. For example:
- Can beauty affect employment chances and income level?
- How does unemployment affect happiness?
- Does owning a pet makes you live longer?
- Can working from home increase employee's work effort?
- Why can't money buy happiness?
The Seminar in Applied Economics: Happiness and Discrimination seeks to answer questions from the field of happiness research and labour market discrimination. Students are given the opportunity to work on empirical projects under intense supervision and write seminar paper. We use household questionnaire data (SOEP) and analyse this with R.
The seminar series is twofold:
- Seminar in Applied Economics (6 ECTS):
- This covers data analysis (get to know your data).
- Choose a topic and a research question.
- Master data manipulation, visualization and modelling.
- Hand in a report.
- Seminar Paper in Applied Economics (6 ECTS):
- Learn essentials of literature search.
- Learn principles of academic writing.
- Give and get feedback from fellow students.
- Hand in an empirical seminar paper (based on your analysis results from part I).
You can only take the second part if you completed the first one.
The seminar series serves as a preparation for an (empirical) thesis.