Field descriptions

A field at UCLA is a set of courses offered by working group of professors. You should be thinking about which group you want to get attached to. Consider your interests, and remember to check whether the group has someone who can support them. Keep in mind the groups control the upstairs cubicles, so if you get attached early you can land yourself a 9th-floor cubicle in the second year.

Working groups generally meet twice a week at the workships and proseminars. During workshops outside economists come and present what they are doing. Proseminars are when your fellow UCLA graduate economists present what they are doing.

You do not have to formally register for a workshop or proseminar to go to one; you may attend research meetings as your interests dictate. The UCLA registrar only offers "enrollment" in them so you can bump your course hours above 12 during the third, fourth and fifth years. That is necessary because you won't often be enrolled in a lot of classes during the later years, but you must maintain full-time student status for tuition purposes. At minimum you should attend the research meetings of your field, and keep an eye on the activities of the others (an email gets sent out Fridays) to see what else you'd like to attend.

The formal working groups in this department are:

History

Historians study what happened before. They have to be creative with data.

International, trade and development

International is basically macro models with more than one country.

Trade uses models with many producers/traders/products, usually endowing each with idiosyncratic characteristics, to portray how changes in the trade environment can change the distribution of producers/traders/products and vice versa.

IO (Industrial organization)

IO is a mixed bag: empirical methods useful to teasing production or demand relations from the data, dynamic games in industry, firm/industry equilibria, collusive and other strategic environments...

Labor

I haven't a clue really.

Macro

Find those red and blue textbooks they made you buy first year and just start reading.

Metrics

Economists discovered "data" sometime roughly a year ago and have been surprised to find "data" may be used to judge whether one theory is good and another not so good. Our top theoreticians are considering the implications for science. More research is needed.

Theory

Models demonstrating how many economists can dance on the head of a pin produced in an imperfectly competitive pin market.

Asset pricing

Word on the street says this field is being phased out.

When the GEA's incentives Through the student's blood shall run, No power function dominates by any criterion. Does there exist an infinitum of the feeble strength of one? The GEA makes us strong.