UCL - Seminar International Economy : trade

[ECGE1334]

[30h + 10h] 5 credits

Teacher(s): Hylke Vandenbussche

Language: English

Level: First

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

The main objectives of this workshop are to teach students:
" To develop coherent economic argument;
" Reading and summary skills;
" To development arguments and written skills;
" To present an argument;
" To work in a group.

Main themes

The workshop will be devoted to the interactions between the financial markets and monetary policy. An inter-esting manner of studying these problems is to examine: (1) how a central bank like the ECB or the American federal Reserve determines the direction of its monetary policy and (2) how monetary policy influences eco-nomic activity. Accordingly, a range of issues are tackled, including: what are the variables (real, financial) which influence the direction of monetary policy, should a central bank react to extreme movements in share values or property prices, how can the direction (restrictive, expansionist) of monetary policy be evaluated at a given point in time, through which financial channels does monetary policy influence economic activity, do these channels have the same importance in different countries and has their importance increased over time, etc.

Content and teaching methods

The purpose of the workshop is to make work students on specific topics. The work will be carried out in groups.

The workshop will be organized in three stages:
a) Presentation of the subject by the hosts of the workshop: one or several presentations will be offered to present the general theme of the workshop. At the end of the presentations, a list of topics for discussion will be established. The different topics will be distributed among the groups that have been established. For each theme, guidance of reading will be proposed by the hosts of the workshop.
b) Summary: students are studying the theme that they have chosen and they produce the results of their reflection in a written report of about 10 pages. The hosts workshops will be available to give advice to prospective students and one or two sessions intermediaries will be organized to assess the progress of work of students.

Discussion: at the end, two or three sessions will be held during which each group will be invited to present orally its re-sults. These presentations will be followed by discussions.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Evaluation: Students are evaluated on the basis of the quality of their contributions in the discussions and on the basis of their written report. Insofar as work is completed in groups, an individual evaluation is also needed. It can take the form of an individual questionnaire on the topic based on material obtained from work done by all the groups