TEACHING - IDEA Lectures
Hannes Mueller
Session 1: Motivation and Empirical Tools
This session will motivate the focus on political economy and the move away from standard growth models towards "institutional economics". We will also discuss the empirical methods. These methods will thereafter be assumed as understood.
Additional Sources:
EC307 Guide, Data for Homework
Session 2: Democracy and Income I
The connection between Democracy and Income is an intensely debated topic. This session discusses the direction income -> democracy. Also, we discuss the widely used Polity IV dataset.
Session 3: Democracy and Income II
In this section we discuss ways in which the literature has tried to step out
of the reverse causality problem. Variation across time has been used to "tell
stories" that are more convincing than simple cross country regressions - despite
the fact that they use the same data. A main message of the research is that
countries seem to react very di¤erently to the same set of institutions. The
session will end with an illustration of how the literature has tried to explain
this heterogeneity.
Session 4: Unwrapping Democracy
In this session we will try to understand why democracy should matter at all. This will lead us to talk about some of the mechanisms that are at work when the bundle of institutions called "democracy" are adopted.
Most government business is conducted by bureaucrats. In discussions of "governance" in development this fact becomes most obvious. This session
will take a look at two aspects of how the bureaucracy a¤ects governance -
bureaucratic institutions and corruption.
Session 6: Violence and the State
This session will look at the interplay between violence, state building and economic development. While this topic is relatively new in economics it has a long been studies in political science and history.
Session 7: The Media as a Transmission Mechanism
In this session we will analyze the role of the media as an institution that can make both government more accountable and inuence voting behavior on the other hand.
Session 8: Economic and Political Power I
There are various channels which transform economic in political power. This session will discuss why this can be a problem for economic development and examples for how both legal and political institutions are endogenous to power.
Session 9: Economic and Political Power II
This session will give an overview over various aspects of the power-economics link. The focus of this session is on showing the exciting variety of empirical work in this area. This will also lead us to discuss the international aspect of the economics-power link.
Session 10: Application Session - The Political Economy of Peru
In this session students will present their work on Peru. The restrictions of the work are that it should contain elements of both politics and economics in Peru and have a theoretical and empirical part which work hand-in-hand. All work will be discussed in class to give students the chance to change elements.