Eltecon

Ma 18 órától a közgazdasági képzés helyzetéről és az Elteconról fogunk beszélgetni Kőhegyi Gergővel (és talán másokkal). (Kép forrása: Fortepan/Ebner)

Godspeed Anna
https://eltecon.hu/lovasz-anna.html

Anna was always ready to help me.
She answered my emails whenever I wrote any to her.
I wish Anna nothing but the best of luck in the land of free.

"She has held one of my favourite subjects at ELTECON, for which I had been looking forward to for a long time, and the classes completely lived up to my expectations. Anna was very knowledgeable about the topics and she was a great teacher too, satisfying both important aspects (expertise and pedagogy) of being an excellent professor. Her cheerfulness and kind personality just added to the enjoyment of the classes. I wish her all the best in her future! :)"

Dear Anna!
I am truly grateful to have been taught by you during my Eltecon studies. I have learnt a lot from you, both professionally and personally. Thank you for all the opinions and advices you gave me about studying abroad and for all your help in recognising and using my skills. I wish you all the best in the US and I hope we will meet soon!

Your eyes are so charming:D Like the gentle moonlight. Best wishes to you , Mrs. Anna . I hope you would enjoy the staying in US☺

Kedves Anna!
Nagyon hálás vagyok, hogy megismerhettelek az Elteconon. Naiv, tapasztalatlan diákként elfogadtál es terelgettél, hogy érdemes kutatóvá váljak. Köszönöm, hogy példát mutattál és teszed ezt továbbra is.
Sok szerencsét es jó utat!
Ui.: A Csészényiben való beszélgetéseink a kedvenc emlékeim egyike az Elteconról.

Dear Anna,
i’m so honored, that I had a chance to be taught by you.You are one of the most supportive and open professors I have ever met, who is always ready to help even if you didn't work with us at that moment.
Thank you and wish you to have a great career and feel homelike during your stay in US.

Dear Anna
I heard that you would come back USA this summer. I personaly very grateful to you taught me so much knowledge about Economics and I got great satisfaction from you help me to learn in class.
Hope you have great time in there.

Thank you for the fruitful class and assignments (especially the writing an essay assignment gave an opportunity to broaden my horizons of scientific intuitiveness) I would love to refer you as my closest women role model economist/researcher. I wish you to have a blast in the US!

Kedves Anna,
Sajnálattal hallom (de egyúttal gratulálok!), hogy elmész, hisz nélküled nem lesz ugyan olyan ez a szak. A GR az egyik kedvenc tantárgyam lett annak ellenére, hogy eredetileg nem igazán érdekelt. Ehhez egyértelműen a Te személyed és szuper hasznos, közvetlen és érdekes óráid kellettek!
Köszönöm szépen ezt a félévet neked és sok sikert!

LOVÁSZ Anna - ELTECON assistant professor courses: introduction to economics, economics of gender and raceresearch interest: labour economics, economics of gender and race

HR-news.

Péter Elek won a prestigeous three years research scholarship from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ("Bolyai").
Kiss Hubert János was awarded at the same time for closing his three years of Bolyai with exceptional achievement.

Well deserved, both!

Eltecon updated their website address.

The Era of Global Decarbonization Open lecture organised by the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Social Sciences.

As you know, we follow the Harvard way in the sense that we use Mankiw's textbook in the Intro Econ course. Behind the curtain, we're constantly thinking about possible improvements. Recently we tried to adapt ideas from the Core Project (https://www.core-econ.org/project/core-the-economy/).

Worth reading the related innovative thougths of Raj Chetty on teaching introductory economics.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/14/18520783/harvard-economics-chetty

The radical plan to change how Harvard teaches economics Raj Chetty has an idea for introducing students to econ that could cause a seismic shift in the field.

low, stable and predictable inflation is to the economy like the bassline to the reggae music
https://twitter.com/CentralBankJA/status/1129517029252304896

Bank of Jamaica on Twitter “Drumroll... presenting BOJ's first Inflation Targeting dubplate for 2019 featuring https://t.co/eX4wcoAcMw”

ELTEcon team at the Smart City challenge
"Smart City Challenge" is a three-round team competition for BA-students, organized by MCC–T-Systems. We are pround to report, ELTEcon-team came in second.

http://eltecon.hu/eltecon-team-at-the-smart-city-challenge.html

Here we come again: this year's ELTEcon competition for secondary school students.
http://eltecon.hu/eltecon-competition-for-secondary-school-students.html

ELTEcon competition for secondary school students - ELTECON Check out this year's ELTEcon competition for secondary school students. You're more than welcome to meet us before you enter into our Applied Economics ...

Thomas Sargent's (2011 Nobel Prize winner) ​​​​​​​Message to the ELTECON program director:

http://eltecon.hu/thomas-sargents-(2011-nobel-prize-winner)-message-to-the-eltecon-program-director.html

Really-really proud of you, Bálint and Dani. The ELTEcon wishes you the very best.

podcast with two of the ELTEcon department's members (sorry, it's in Hungarian)
https://g7.hu/podcast/20181208/kozepiskolasokon-kiserleteznenek-magyar-kozgazdaszok/

Középiskolásokkal kísérleteznének magyar közgazdászok | G7 - Gazdasági sztorik érthetően Mi köze a pillecukor-evésnek ahhoz, hogy valaki mekkora sikert ér el az életben? Horn Dániel és Kiss Hubert János a G7 podcast vendégei.

ELTEcon presents the first ELTEcon Film Club. The movie will be Moneyball (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/ [WITH HUNGARIAN SUBTITLES] and it will take place at Moha Café on 24 January at 18 PM. After the movie we will talk about it, and the moderator will be Panka Bencsik, an Economics PhD student from University of Sussex. (Panka studied Survey Statistics at ELTE-TáTK.) During that you will be able to drink (for example beer) at Moha Café.
The langauge of the event is English.
Please confirm your attendance with sending an e-mail to [email protected]

Moneyball (2011) Directed by Bennett Miller. With Brad Pitt, Robin Wright, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's successful attempt to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.

Programs | Department of Economics and Business We are a leading, densely international department offering innovative research and industry-led education in Vienna and Budapest, two of Europe’s most buzzing financial and technology hubs.

when the cosmos meets the ELTEcon logo - mandala (credit: Parádi Kriszta)

Good to know! (sample question from the Elteconnect 2018 quiz)

Match Eltecon professors to their earlier competitive sports!

1. Anna Lovász
2. Áron Horváth
3. Péter Pete
4. János Hubert Kiss
5. Gábor Lovics
6. Gergely Kőhegyi
7. Balázs Váradi
8. Dániel Horn
9. Péter Elek

a) Triathlon
b) Road bicycle racing
c) Orienteering 1
d) Orienteering 2
e) Table tennis
f) Basketball
g) Marathon run
h) Gymnastics
i) Foil fencing

From 87 teams of 32 countries, the ELTECON-team is the winner of the Inter-University Student Economics Tournament 2018 organized by economics-games.com

The team formed by Kristóf Nagy, Bálint Parragi, and Zsigmond Szajbély, second year ELTECON-BA students won the Inter-University Economics Tournement 2018, a prestigious international competition based on an economics simulation. The game serves as an illustration of strategic thinking using the models of Microeconomics, Game Theory, Industrial Organization, Behavioral Economics and Environmental Economics.

ELTE has been shown as the highest ranked Hungarian University offering Economics&Econometrics by the Times Higher Education World University Ranking!

(https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking) (Just choose Hungary and Economics&Econometrics to see the list)

Although ELTEcon should be proud of this, we share the concerns of many that these ‘league tables’ do more harm than good (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/11/university-rankings-tip-of-iceberg/).

These rankings can provide serious incentives for Universities to focus on. These incentives might be perverse if the indicators are not well chosen. For instance, if the ranking rewards the number of publications, professors will put more effort on research than teaching. Or conversely, if indicators of teaching are given more weight, we might downplay the importance of research, and focus only on teaching. None of this is good. Admittedly, creating a good, balanced ranking of Universities is a hard task. We cover this, and also many other education-accountability related topics at our education-economics courses as ELTEcon. But we, as an economics program, do not care much about these rankings.

We believe that each program should have its own focus and goal, which should be clearly communicated to the incoming students. Our goal is to turn every student into a proper economist, which is hard to measure by numbers (http://eltecon.hu/applied-economics-ba-program.html). What we do care about, is that we have the time and the energy that we can devote to our current and incoming students. What we also care about is to have a carefully crafted and interconnected set of demanding courses, a coherent program, which can help you to become an economist. If you want proof, just ask our alumni (http://eltecon.hu/out.html). You’ll see what we have achieved.

World University Rankings The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019 includes more than 1,250 universities, making it our biggest international league table to date.

The low ratio of female students in STEM fields (science technology engineering math), as well as in Economics, which some universities now consider among STEM fields), has received a lot of attention lately (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/business/why-womens-voices-are-scarce-in-economics.html, https://www.ft.com/content/0e5d27ba-2b61-11e8-9b4b-bc4b9f08f381). While the proportion of females among STEM students continues to increase, the ratio of female students in Economics has levelled off in the last decade and remains around 30% in most western countries. (pic: https://www.nature.com/news/women-in-physics-face-big-hurdles-still-1.20349)

One reason cited frequently is that women shy away from Economics due to its highly quantitative content, however, this is contradicted by the fact that their enrollment in math has continued to increase. Women may be affected by stereotypes: people generally imagine economists as rich men in suits, in finance or consulting. Another frequently mentioned obstacle is the lack of female role models and mentors, since the share of female professors in Economics is even lower.
This issue is an important one to address, since economics influences policymaking more than other disciplines do. Surveys have shown that women care about different policy issues than men (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/coep.12004). The lack of representation of women in the field can therefore lead to policy debates that are dominated by male views.
Most international Economics associations (AEA, EEA, ESPE) pay special attention to aiding the careers of women in Economics. Suggested policy interventions include providing better information about the nature and uses of economics training prior to and during the beginning of BA programs, presentations and mentoring by successful female economists, and teaching methods that better support female involvement. At ELTEcon, we have traditionally had a high ratio of female enrollment and many successful female alumni. One third year elective course – Gender and Race in the Labor Market - focuses in detail on the situation of women and other minorities in the labor market, so if you are interested, you can learn more about these issues there.

When founding ELTEcon, the principal aim was to create an Economics program the implements the best practices from the best Economics programs all around the world. Living up to the high standards that we set to ourselves requires hard work both from the teachers and the students. (Just ask our students how many assignments they have to do and how many student parties they miss…) However, being demanding does not preclude an enjoyable atmosphere. We, the faculty pride ourselves on knowing each of our students by their name and on having our doors open to them anytime. And when the final oral exam comes and our students defend their BA thesis, we are at least as nervous as they are. Hence it is not surprising that we feel a parental pride when we see that an alumnus of ELTEcon publishes a scholarly paper in the famous NBER Working Paper Series (https://www.nber.org/papers/w25224), a springboard to the best Economics journals. Congratulations Dániel Csaba!
pic: Daniel Csaba presents his thesis at ELTEcon, 2011

Want to know the basics of price elasticity from the sexiest man alive (https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/11/6/18068324/idris-elba-sexiest-man-alive-people-magazine)? Remember this scene with Idris Elba from Wire : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYWYgTjMQh4
Want to understand deeply and calculate elasticity on real data? Come to ELTEcon!

Stringer Bell explains "elastic product"

The students at ELTEcon hail from seventeen different countries all over the globe. While we usually focus on elections in our own country, many of us also follow the fascinating horserace that is the next nationwide U.S. election of congressmen and -women as well as senators on November the 6th. Will the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives to counterbalance a Republican president? Perhaps even in the Senate? Given the influence of the United States in the world, those outcomes will affect us all. One can even (no endorsement!) gamble online on the outcomes.
But if you want to understand how individual local polls and different data on e.g. the amount of money set aside for campaigning in the future can be used to quantify uncertainty and make probabilistic predictions (as does, for example, Nate Silver, see pic), you should take a class in Statistics. And if you want to understand what factors affect election outcomes and how those, in turn, affect economic policy, you should take a class in Political Economy – both offered as part of the curriculum at ELTEcon – Budapest.

ELTEcon is 10 years old this year! A nice anniversary with a round a number. Are those 10 years special? Are they very different from 9 or 11?
There is some evidence that round numbers are special. Consider the left-hand side graph from a study (http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/assets/files/Website_Marathons.pdf) that shows finishing times of marathon runners. A noteworthy aspect of the graph is that a lot of runners finish just before round finishing times (3 hours, 3 and a half hours etc.) denoted by the black vertical lines.
In the department we would be very proud if we could run the marathon in 4 hours and 2 minutes, but seemingly many runners really want to accomplish it in less than 4 hours.
Or watch the right-hand side graph extracted from another study (http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/assets/files/Website_Inattention_Cars.pdf). It represents the selling price of used cars as a function of the miles that they had already run.
As one would expect, the more miles a car has, the less is its selling price. However, interestingly there are jumps in the price at the round mileage numbers (20000, 30000 etc.). Seemingly, cars with 59900 miles are quite different from cars with 60010 miles. What is your guess, if instead of miles we used kilometres (1 mile ≈ 1.6 km), then would we see jumps at 64400 kilometres (about 40000 miles)? Or we would see jumps at the multiples of 10000 kilometres?
For more on round numbers enroll in the "Behavioral Economics" course offered at ELTEcon!

Going away to study far from your hometown is a difficult decision. We argue that coming to ELTEcon – Budapest could be the best pick. Our classes consist of 40-50 students and that makes our economics program exclusive. Our highly committed faculty offers a top international curriculum that enabled our former students to successfully tackle top economics Masters and PhD programs all over the world.

Beside the program’s strengths, cost of living is also on one's mind when deciding where to go. Beautiful Budapest is one of the world’s secret hot spots, and according Numbeo's numbers, significantly cheaper to live in than London, Vienna or Amsterdam. Consumer prices in Budapest are 37% lower than in Vienna, 90% lower than in London and by 85% lower than in Amsterdam, to use a few other significant European university cities as a comparison. Rent is also a significant portion of one's expenses: renting a place to live in London is 342% costlier than in Budapest, rent in Amsterdam is 237% higher than in Budapest, and even in nearby Vienna it is 50% more expensive to rent your own apartment.

Of course if somebody wonders what on earth could possibly explain such rent differentials, and what factors influence housing prices in general, she might want to enroll in the "Real Estate and Urban Economics" course offered at ELTEcon!

Hip-hip hurray for two of the ELTEcon-department members:
Last year Daniel Horn was appointed for associate editor of the European Sociological Review, and now Kiss Hubert has been chosen to serve as an Academic Editor on the Editorial Board of PLOS ONE, a prestigious international scientific journal.
Congratulations!
https://eltecon.hu/hubert-janos-kiss-is-an-editor-at-plos-one.html

This year's well deserved award goes to Paul Romer and William Nordhaus. You can meet the basics of their influential thoughts at the eltecon's Macroeconomics course. Until then, read this:
https://old.nobelprize.org/eco-popular.pdf?_ga=2.227540122.623048595.1538993844-214840330.1538993844

Believe it or not: our gadget-responsive homepage is alive: http://eltecon.hu.
Promise: contents will be improved.

Last Thursday we had this semester's opening beer event. This is an old tradition of Eltecon, where students and teachers have a drink, relax and chat with each other informally.