The Master in Economics is a graduate program that allows students to complete their training in economics providing them with a thorough understanding of the role and working of the state in modern economies.

The Master is a full-time, intensive course, with a maximum enrollment of 20 student . Mefap offers courses taught in English and it is accessible to students of all countries. The diploma, issued by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, is recognized as a second level Master’s degree by the Italian Government.
The Master degree (Master Universitario di II livello) will be granted by Università Cattolica del SacroCuore upon the successful completion of the required course work and of the research project for a total of 60 credits. After receiving the Master Degree, successful students may apply for admission to the Ph.D. in Public Economics with a stipend. If admitted to the Ph.D. program, a student may be granted exams waivers for the course work already undertaken during the Master, to the extent that it overlaps with the first year courses of the Ph.D. program.

Obiettivi
The Master will allow students to:

• Acquire the needed knowledge and research experience in order to pursue further studies with a PhD in Economics;
• Allow them to Integrate their academic experience with professional skills of theoretical and practical relevance also through Internship in the research departments of banks, governments and international organization such as ILO, IMF, or the World Bank.

Destinatari
Admission is open to candidates:

• who hold an Italian Four-year University Degree (diploma di laurea), or a Master of Science (diploma di laurea specialistica);
• who hold a post-graduate degree or any foreign academic qualification previously recognised as equivalent by the academic authorities, or recognised in accordance with inter-university agreements of co-operation and mobility;
• who, by the date of the application deadline, have not yet been granted a degree, or a foreign academic qualification. In this case, the candidate will be requested to submit the diploma di laurea or the foreign academic qualification by the beginning of the Master course.

Applications can also be submitted by candidates who do not hold the degrees mentioned above. In this case, if their candidature is evaluated positively by the Admission Committee despite lacking some of the requirements, the interested students will be allowed to audit all classes. However, they will eventually be officially enrolled in the Master Program only after having received the required Degree, which is an essential pre-requisite for being granted the title of Master.

Contenuti
Mathematics
The course provides students with a thorough understanding of mathematical concepts and tools essential to economic modelling, with particular reference to static and dynamic optimisation asapplied to microeconomics and macroeconomics. The course also covers differential calculus inEuclidean space; quasi-concavity; Taylor expansion; Implicit Function Theorem; Envelope Theorem;continuity concepts of correspondences; Theorem of the Maximum; fixed point theorems; differenceand differential equations.

Econometrics I
The course focuses on techniques for estimating regression models, on problems commonly encountered in estimating such models, and on interpreting the estimates from such models. The goal of the course is to teach students the theory and practice of econometrics and to provide examples taken from the economics literature. The course includes empirical tutorials where students will learn how to estimate econometric models on real world data.

Econometrics II
The course intends to provide students with both the theoretical understanding and the practical ability to implement some of the techniques most commonly used in the econometric analysis of time series and panel data. Throughout the course, the emphasis will be placed on practical applications using Stata.

Research Methods
The course provides students with in-depth knowledge of recent advances in the analysis of surveydata and (quasi)experimental-data. In particular the course aims to equip students with the following competencies:

• Awareness of the empirical approach to economics;
• Experience in the analysis and use of empirical data in economics;
• Understanding the nature of survey data and methods of dealing with it;
• The use of econometric software packages as tools of policy analysis;
• Understanding of causal and non-causal relations in economics and policy making.

The course covers topics of interest in current research, with an emphasis on the issues entailed by their application (i.e. Public Economics, Labour Economics and Policy Issues). Tutorials and laboratory sessions, in which students can apply the techniques using micro-econometric software packages, complete the course.

Microeconomics
The course is an introduction to advanced topics in microeconomic theory. It provides a survey of the main tools, results and achievements of microeconomic theory. Its objective is to equip the students with tools which are essential to study applications of economic theory and for setting up and solving a wide range of economic problems. Therefore, while it aims to cover significant recent developments in the field, it mostly stresses classic papers rather than yet unpublished work, and particular attention is devoted to methodology and to economic applications. Familiarity with standard calculus, in particular optimisation theory, and with basic probability theory is assumed.

Macroeconomics
The New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK-DSGE) framework has emerged as the workhorse in contemporary macroeconomics for the analysis of business fluctuations and the design of optimal monetary policy. This course starts from the basic ideas lying behind this framework (i.e. intertemporal optimization for a representative agent, the use of Blanchard-Kahn procedures for solving the models), and it aims at covering the literature up to the analysis of medium-scale models. The final part of the course deals with the incorporation of financial frictions into the NK-DSGE framework to cope with issues pertaining to financial fragility which have been brought to the fore by the Global Financial Crisis.

Public Economics
This course discusses the role and the limits of government intervention in the economy. The course is divided in three parts, each taught by a different lecturer: welfare economics, taxation theory and political economics. The organization of the course follows a logical structure and the three parts must be thought of as interdependent.
Welfare economics sets up the stage, by defining the normative criteria for assessing the relative role of states and markets; taxation theory applies these tools to the revenue side of the budgets, asking which is the optimal way to organize the tax system given the budget requirements of government; political economics shifts the emphasis from the normative to the positive side of the issues, asking how in fact governments will choose taxation and expenditure given the existing political institutions.
Students will be asked to seat for a single e examination at the end of the course.

Programming Stata
This course is designed to introduce participants to the basics of programming in Stata. It focuses on the use of do-files to automate your own work.
Specific topics include macro variables, looping, branching, subscripting, and personalise the output. By the end of this one-day course, the participants will be able to program effectively in Stata version 11/11.
It is assumed that participants will have basic knowledge of Stata or be familiar with the contents of this course and have used Stata for at least few months.

Project work and final exam
The Master degree is granted upon the completion of a research project by which the candidate shows her/his ability to master the topics covered in the course work undertaken in the first three terms typically the research project takes the form of a research paper, written under the supervision of a member of the Master Faculty or of a researcher approved by the Director of the Master. Under certain circumstances, a student may have the opportunity to undertake a stage on a project that is evaluated by the Director of the Master being consistent with the Master goals. In these cases, the research paper can be substituted by an essay detailing the results achieved during the stage, to be written under the supervision of a member of the Faculty and/or of the external tutor supervising the stage activity.
Both in the case of a research paper and of a stage essay, the candidate will have to defend the results of her/his research during an oral final exam, in which the overall performance of the candidate in the Master program will also be assessed.

Note

Durata 1 year, beginning from September. Borse di studio e finanziamenti A number of scholarships, covering up to the entire tuition fees, may be awarded to the best applicants. The decision is taken from the Admission Committee upon consideration of the candidates’curriculum studioum,working experience and the overall quality of their application. L’INPS Gestione ex Inpdap mette a disposizione 5 borse di studio del valore di € 10.000 a copertura della quota di partecipazione al Master in Economics