Structural behavioral economics

We build the course around the recent chapter by Stefano DellaVigna in the Handbook of Behavioral Economics.

• DellaVigna, S. (2018). Structural behavioral economics. In Bernheim B. D. , DellaVigna, S., and Laibson, D., editors, Handbook of Behavioral Economics, volume 1, pages 613-723. North Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

However, the focus will be on the implementation, exploration, and estimation of structural behavioral models. We will make heavy use of Python, the SciPy ecosystem , and Jupyter Notebooks throughout the course. We set up a proper software engineering workflow to ensure sound implementation and reproducibility building on GitHub. Please see here for some introductory resources to each of the tools.

Neoclassical baseline

We will discuss the recent developments in structural behavioral economics using the seminal paper by Keane & Wolpin (1997) and the respy research code to contrast it to the neoclassical approach.

• Keane, M. P., & Wolpin, K. I. (1997). The career decisions of young men. Journal of Political Economy, 105(3), 473–522.

• respy (2018). respy: A Python package for the simulation and estimation of a prototypical finite-horizon dynamic discrete choice model. Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1189209

Iterations

• Winter Quarter 2019, Graduate Program at the University of Bonn, please see here for details.