The curriculum of the master programme in Policy Economics provides students with economic theory and empirical tools that are essential to become an outstanding policy economist. Core courses of this programme are Advanced Public Economics, Applied Econometrics, and Advanced Macro-economics. Furthermore, students can follow either Economics of Organisations, Industrial Organisation or Advanced Money, Credit and Banking.
Furthermore, students can choose from several elective courses: Policy Issues in Public Spending on Labour, Education and Health, Advanced Political Economy, and Advanced Development Economics.
The master programme also provides two large and intensive seminars. In the first seminar students become familiar with a wide array of applied research techniques (econometric methods of policy evaluation, cost-benefit analysis and field experiments) while discussing recent cases in policy evaluation. For the second seminar students can choose between the Seminar Economic Policy or the Seminar Quantitative Macro-economics.
The Seminar Economic Policy is devoted to analysing highly relevant policy issues. The Seminar Economic Policy changes every year to study policy issues that are most pressing at that time. In past years, the subjects were: the euro crisis, the Great Recession, globalisation, income inequality, and taxation of the wealthy and multinationals. In the Seminar Quantitative Macro-economics you learn how to analyse and estimate modern macroeconomic models. The last part of the master is devoted to writing the master’s thesis.
In many courses and seminars, you will work together with fellow students on assignments and papers. Moreover, during the seminars you will give presentations on your work or the course materials.
Curriculum
The curriculum consists of:
- 29% Applications
- 33% Theory
- 38% Empirics
In class
In an assignment for Advanced Public Economics you are going to calculate how high the income tax rate should be at each income level for a country of your choice. You will work in groups of two students. To make your calculations, you will use an Excel programme that contains the optimal tax model of Nobelprize winner James Mirrlees. Use the programme to calculate the tax schedule for your country and explain why the tax schedule looks the way it does.
Study schedule
Disclaimer
The overview above provides an impression of the curriculum for this programme for the academic year 2025-2026. It is not an up-to-date study schedule for current students. They can find their full study schedules on MyEUROpens external. Please note that minor changes to this schedule are possible in future academic years.