Computer Tools for Economics (CTE)

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This is the home page of the course "Computer Tools for Economics" of the Doctoral Program in Economics and Organization (DEO) and in Economics (DEC), School of Advanced Studies and University "Ca' Foscari" of Venice.

Class schedule

Tentatively, the classes will be held each Friday,starting from October 14-th, 4.15 PM (8 meetings, one hour each). The last two meetings are scheduled for January 2006, the precise dates will be announced. A more detailed tentative program is following:

Lect. Date Topic
1 Oct. 14 / 16.15Students' ibooks setup and MacOsX
2 Oct. 21 / 16.15Network connectivity (Telnet, Ssh, FTP, SFTP)
3 Oct. 28 / 11.30Tagged typesetting I, Html and web publishing
4 Nov. 04 / 11.30 Intro to statistical packages, Stata
5 Nov. 11 / 11.30 Excel
6 Nov. 18 / 11.30Maple/MuPAD
7 Nov. 25 / 11.30Tagged typesetting II, LaTex and presentations with prosper
8 Dec. 02 / 11.30Web resources for economists
9 ? R (programming environment for statistics and more)
10 ? NEOS or other topics of interest

Syllabus

Download the syllabus.

Useful links

Reading list

This is relative to last year course (2004/05), I have left it to give an idea of the content of the course. It will be updated along the new course
  1. Lecture 1. Mac OsX setup, we have dowloaded and/or briefly discussed:
  2. Lecture 2. Please download a Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure FTP client. Win users can find the programs at www.ssh.com (exact url) or searching at the Tucows Archive. Mac users have already the software, using "Terminal". If you want a more sophisticated interface download "Fetch" or "Cyberduck" (search for them at Versiontracker, for example).
  3. Postponed to November 5-th Lecture 3. After a brief introduction to markup languages and html, we will publish some webpages. Please, download a SFTP or SSH client (see previous lecture if you are a win user) that is needed to upload the pages on the server. If you like, you could also prepare your own homepage that will be put online (provided that you already have a unive account). Have a look at the W3C site for a massive amount of information on html and related topics (and much, much more...)
  4. Web resources for economists.
    1. Stay tuned on Inomics: jobs, positions and conferences;
    2. RePEc: research papers in economics. See also the search engine IDEAS, where you can create your own author page and download statistics;
    3. Other archives: SSRN, ResearchIndex, Scholar Google;
    4. What if you want to submit a paper: EconWPA;
    5. Data, papers and research of outstanding quality: NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research);
    6. Nearly everithing on earth: WEBEC and Economics and Economists Resources (thanks to Taryin for the suggestion!);
    7. Fresh data and charts: Economagic (this regexp might help <font[^>]*>[^<]*</fon.[^>]*>);
    8. NEOS server for optimization.
      var x >= -50, <= 50;

minimize fun:  10*sin(0.3*x)*sin(1.3*x^2) + 0.00001*x^4 + 0.2*x+80;

solve;
display x;
  5. Here are some useful links to "computational economics" material:
    1. Arthur "El Farol" paper;
    2. Schelling model: type "Schelling segregation model" on Google to see lot of links. Read an introductory article by Rauch or download a research paper by Vriend;
    3. A general site about agnet-based CE is Tesfatsion website;
    4. There are books on some blends of CE: "Applied Computational Economics and Finance", Mario J. Miranda & Paul L. Fackler, MIT Press, 2002; "Numerical methods in economics", Kenneth L. Judd, MIT Press, 1998;

      Download another book by Kendrck, Mercado and Amman, with models and examples in GAMS, Excel...

    Do not hesitate to contact me for further information or any other need.


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