Teaching

VU Amsterdam

MSc - Refresher Course: Math, Statistics, Programming

Block: Pre-Master. Offered: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.

I teach refresher courses for incoming MSc students in economics, public policy, and STREEM (spatial, transport, and environmental economics). Topics include math, statistics, and programming. Before 2024, I also taught the Microeconomics sequence. From 2024 onwards, the programming language is R (instead of Stata). We made this decision in the hope that the students would benefit from a consistent programming language throughout the entire program.

Topics include:

  • Math: derivatives, integrals, simple optimization, simple linear algebra.
  • Statistics: elementary probability theory, elementary statistical theory, and some of the theorems in Wooldridge’s 10 Fundamental Theorems for Econometrics.
  • Microeconomics: basic to intermediate consumer theory, producer theory, Nash equilibrium, and decisions under uncertainty.
  • R: data wrangling, data manipulation, data management, mainly with data.table, fixest, and ggplot2.

MSc - Introduction to Econometrics

Block: Block I. Offered: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.

Topics include: OLS, IV, static panel data (fixed effects, random effects), applied ML (LASSO, RIDGE, PCA).

Evaluation: 4.2/5

Typical references:

  • Introduction to Econometrics by James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson
  • Causal Inference: The Mixtape by Scott Cunningham
  • The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality by Nick Huntington-Klein
  • Learning Microeconometrics with R by Christopher P. Adams
  • An Introduction to Statistical Learning with R by Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani

MSc - Applied Econometrics

Block: Block I. Offered: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.

Topics include dynamic panel data (GMM, Anderson-Hsiao, Arellano-Bond, Blundell-Bond), binary choice (LPM, logit, probit), quantile regressions, DiD (TWFE, Sun-Abraham, Roth pre-trends tests, and Rambachan-Roth bounds), RDD.

Evaluation: 4.7/5

Typical references:

  • Introduction to Econometrics by James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson
  • Causal Inference: The Mixtape by Scott Cunningham
  • The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality by Nick Huntington-Klein
  • Learning Microeconometrics with R by Christopher P. Adams

BSc - Microeconomics I

Block: Block II. Offered: 2022.

Standard microeconomics for first-year bachelor students. Topics include consumer behavior, producer behavior, market structure (perfect competition, monopoly, oligopoly), game theory (dominant strategy, IESDS, Nash equilibrium), auctions, and decisions under uncertainty.

BSc + MSc - Research Project and Thesis

Block: Blocks III and V. Offered: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.

I supervise bachelor’s and master’s theses in industrial organization, innovation, and applied econometrics. Students typically use methods such as productivity and demand estimation, recent difference-in-differences estimators, and natural language processing.

Data sources frequently used in these projects include Compustat (US public firms), USPTO and EPO (patents), SDC (merger records), and patent litigation datasets.

I have mentored students whose work has been nominated for best master’s thesis awards at VU Amsterdam and by the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM).

Prospective students interested in these areas are welcome to reach out with ideas.