Master Social Economics
Preparing the next generation of policy advisors
Can the labour market position of disadvantaged children be improved by education? Why do people smoke? Do guns cause crime? Why do people take the car to work when there are huge traffic jams? Are black schools damaging the development of a child?
Social questions are typically difficult to analyze because it is almost always impossible or unethical to perform experiments. In this master Social Economics you will learn how to analyze such questions with sound methods.
What is Social Economics about?
The IES master track Social Economics is concerned with economic questions in a social context. The track aims to train students to understand and analyze a wide range of social phenomena from an economic point of view and to investigate and interpret these issues empirically.
A question such as “do guns cause crime?” is an example of a policy relevant social question. Suppose that we find that in societies with more guns there is more crime. A very important point is that this does not prove that guns cause crime. It might instead be that in societies with more crime, people buy more guns to protect themselves. From an economic point of view it is important to analyze how circumstances influence the decision to buy a weapon. We need to know how people value guns, to understand when and why they will buy a gun. The reasons why people buy guns influence the effectiveness of various polices to reduce crime. Therefore, to decide on a good policy empirical information is needed. Giving some random group of people more guns than another group and analyzing the impact on crime rates is unethical. Economists have developed very powerful tools to analyze these questions without having to perform a real experiment.
Students of the social economics track will be given a thorough understanding of how social issues can be analyzed from an economic perspective and will learn the complex tools with which empirical claims about causality can be established. The focus in the track is on intuition not on technical considerations. Lessons learned in social economics are invaluable for developing a critical understanding of the economic dimension of social problems and the related empirical claims, including those made in academic papers, policy reports, newspapers.