Development Economics, LMU 2018 Summer

July 8 Update: Your grades are in the system. See the grades distribution below. You can see your exams on Wednesday, July 18 at 4pm in my office.
May 27 Update: Note that for the extra lecture on May 28 we meet at: Geschw.-Scholl-Pl. 1 (E) – E 006
May 15 Update: There is a mistake in the syllabus. For lecture 6 you should read Ray, chapters 6 and 8. Not 6 and 7 as it is in the syllabus. Sorry!
May 14 Update: To catch up with this weeks tutorial topic we will postpone the lecture on foreign aid to May 28. The remaining program remains as planned. Thank you for your understanding.
April 13 Update: Please, note that there was a mistake in the link to the compressed readings file. Now the link is correct. I have also added a link to Stata 12 version of the datasets we used today.
March 23 Update: Dear students, our class begins soon. We will start the replication exercises using Stata already on Friday, April 13. We start with a paper by Mankiw, Romer, and Weil: A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth (1992). Please, make sure to read the paper before the class on Friday.

Development Economics

Vojtěch Bartoš: vojtech.bartos@econ.lmu.de

  • Lectures:
    • Thu 8:30 AM – 11:45 AM, Luisenstr. 37 (C) C 024
    • With one exception: on May 28 (MONDAY!) we meet at: Geschw.-Scholl-Pl. 1 (E) – E 006
  • Tutorials:
    • Fri 12:15 AM – 15:45 AM, Ludwigstr. 28, VG 207 (IuK Pool)
  • Office hours: by appointment via email

Course syllabus

PDF download You can download the most recent version of the course syllabus here.

Please, before asking me questions about the logistics of the course, try to find the answers in the syllabus. Most likely you will find the answers there.

Readings for the course

Please, find the readings here. The password will be provided in the lecture.

Lecture slides

  • Lecture 1: Introduction
  • Lecture 2, 3: Traditional growth models and poverty traps, and the way towards MDGs (.do file on growth rate of countries relative to US)
  • Lecture 4: Modern (endogenous) growth models, poverty traps, and empirics
  • Lecture 5: Games in economic development
  • Lecture 6: Measuring poverty, inequality, and discrimination
    • You can read about the exchange between Allen and Ravallion on the new proposed poverty measure here
  • Lecture 7: The role of culture and institutions in economic development (social capital)
  • Lecture 8: The role of foreign aid in development economics
  • Lecture 9: Health, nutrition and development (human capital)
  • Lecture 10: Education and development (human capital)
  • Lecture 11: Credit markets and Microcredit (financial capital)
  • Lecture 12: Microcredit evaluations (financial capital)

    • Tutorials

    Tutorial reports repositories

    Sample exam

    Click here for a sample exam.

    Exam results