Seminar

One requirement of the Master’s program is that students attend a weekly seminar where economists (some from UNH, some from other schools, some from elsewhere) present research papers. This gives students a great opportunity to see what economists actually do (other than teach economics), and to get ideas on potential research topics for our papers. Some of these presentations are way over my head – lots of complicated equations and formulae that I’ve never heard of – but if you don’t worry too much about the details, you can usually understand the general ideas and applications. For example, one paper was about exchange rates, which I think are incredibly complicated, but the basic idea behind this paper was that the people who deal with currency exchange fit into two groups: commercial traders (importer/exporters), and financial traders (bankers). From there, the model of how these two groups interact is too much to put down here, but it definitely helps to make the assumption that there are just two types of people who deal with exchanging currency.
Another paper dealt with the effects of democracy on economic stability. The main idea was that democracy will bring about more stability in a country that is ethnically diverse. But before you can even attempt to test this theory, you have to find both a way to measure democracy, and a way to measure stability. Democracy is a very subjective concept which is pretty hard to put into numbers, but there are organizations out there (such as Freedom House at freedomhouse.org) who rate countries in terms of how democratic they are. Still, whether or not these numbers actually mean anything is debatable, which brings up one of my favorite parts of these seminars – econ professors LOVE to criticize each other. They question every assumption, doubt their methods, and argue every conclusion. And maybe this isn’t as exciting as watching Spartans defend their homeland, it’s still pretty entertaining, and there’s usually decent snacks as well. So this is one of my favorite parts of the program thus far, even though I know that someday I’ll be the one up there presenting, and I’m definitely not looking forward to the grilling that is sure to take place.