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PhD program
Economics
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The 4-years PhD program in Economics aims at training students with the most advanced and up-to-date skills in the field of economics, preparing them to independently perform innovative economic research.
The PhD Program is interdisciplinary and internationally oriented. The interdisciplinarity is guaranteed by the heterogeneity of the Department which includes economists from different fields, statisticians, mathematicians, and computer scientists. The PhD students will benefit from the numerous long-term international collaborations of various members of the Department, offering doctoral students the opportunity to spend the prescribed visiting period of no less than 6 months at prestigious foreign universities and research centers. The aim is to strengthen the scientific skills of the candidate and to complete the thesis possibly under the co-supervision of some of the leading experts in the field of investigation. Members of the Department have established scientific relationships with international universities and research centers such as the Toulouse School of Economics, Barcelona School of Economics, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Brown University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Copenhagen, Queen Mary University, University College London, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, Universities of the Network for Integrated Behavioral Science (Nottingham, Warwick and East Anglia), CEMFI in Madrid, and LISER in Luxembourg.
The first two years of the PhD program will be characterized by intensive and structured teaching activities with the aim of both providing the most advanced tools of economic analysis and helping doctoral students to develop innovative ideas for their theses. The courses are distributed across quarters and, in the first year, they include mathematics, statistics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. Elective courses of the second year will help students to define their innovative research ideas and can include: industrial economics, international trade, experimental and behavioral economics, labor economics, health economics, game theory, crime and conflict economics, and comparative economic development.
The third and fourth year will be fully devoted to work on the thesis, including a visiting period to a foreign university or research institute for no less than 6 months. In the last year the students will also be trained for the academic job market with mock interviews with members of the Department.
The doctoral students will attend the weekly departmental seminars to get exposed to the research frontier in economics presented by international renowned scholars in various fields. The doctoral students will present regularly at internal seminars to discuss their research ideas and more advanced research projects in an informal environment to receive valuable feedback from the faculty. The doctoral students are endowed with generous research funds for data collection and to attend workshops, conferences, and summer schoolsuseful to establish a research network.
Graduate students will pursue an academic career at universities or research centers, international institutions, central banks, and governmental agencies such as the European Commission or Antitrust authorities.