ISEG Winter School 2027

Speaker: Giulia Giupponi (Bocconi University)

Date: January 20–22, 2027 (9:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.)

Room : Auditorium 4 (New Quelhas Building)

Course Description:

This short course provides an overview of selected topics in modern public economics, with a focus on the design and evaluation of social insurance, pensions, taxes and transfers, and labor market policies. The course is organized around a central policy-design question: How should governments balance insurance and redistribution against behavioral responses, fiscal costs, and labor market distortions?

The course combines theoretical frameworks with empirical evidence. We will discuss canonical models, including the Bailey-Chetty framework for optimal unemployment insurance, and show how sufficient-statistics formulas connect theory to credible empirical estimates. The course will also cover quasi-experimental evidence using difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, regression kink, and event-study designs.

By the end of the course, students should be able to: understand the main economic rationales for social insurance and redistribution; interpret empirical evidence on policy impacts; and relate reduced-form estimates to welfare and policy design.

PROGRAM

Part I: Social Insurance and Unemployment Insurance

• Introduction: Why Public Economics and Why Social Insurance?
• Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Theory and Empirical Implementation
• Insuring workers or insuring jobs? Unemployment insurance versus short-time work

Part II: Retirement Policy

• Why Social Security?
• A Taxonomy of Pension Reforms
• Social Security and Labor Supply
• Social Security and Savings

Part III: Support for Low-Income Households: Tax Credits and Minimum Wages

• Labor Supply Responses to Taxes and Transfers
• Minimum Wage Policy: Employment and Distributional Impacts

Course Requirements

Some prior knowledge of microeconomics and applied microeconometrics is recommended. Familiarity with causal inference methods such as differences-in-differences, regression discontinuity, event studies, and instrumental variables will be useful.

Student Feedback Session

There will be a number of slots available for participants who are interested in receiving feedback on their work during individual or small-group meetings. Interested students are encouraged to express their interest in advance and, where appropriate, to share a brief description of their project (about 1–2 pages).

Speaker: Rui Pedro Esteves

Date: January 20–22, 2027 (2:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.)

Room: Auditorium 5 (New Quelhas Building)

Course Description:

How did the major markets for financial assets emerge, develop, and become international? Why are these markets often geographically concentrated? How significant were differences in infrastructure, institutions, and regulation for their success? What explains the ebbs and flows of financial regulation? In this module, we seek to answer these questions from a microhistorical perspective. In particular, we focus on the interaction between the functions and actors in financial markets and their outcomes, as shaped by the regulatory framework. We will examine several ‘financial revolutions,’ from the emergence of organized stock exchanges in the 17th century to the Dodd-Frank Act and other efforts toward stricter regulation of financial transactions since the 2008 crisis.

PROGRAM

Part I: Capital Markets: Origins and Going Global

Part II: Stock Markets – Microstructure and Regulation

Part III: Types of Banking

Part IV: Banking Regulation

Part V: Certification and Innovation

Part VI: Positive Theories of Financial Regulation

Speaker: Armando Miano, University of Naples Federico II, CSEF, and CEPR

Date: January 25–27, 2027 (9:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.)

Room : Auditorium 4 (New Quelhas Building)

Course Description:

Much of human knowledge is stored in unstructured formats, particularly in written text. This course teaches methods for processing and analyzing text data. The learning objectives are to understand the structure and concepts of “text-as-data” methods and to evaluate the use of text-analysis tools in economic research. The course will conclude with an overview of non-standard data beyond text, specifically audio and image data. The course covers 10 topics, listed below. For most topics, a theoretical lecture will be presented first, followed by a discussion of a recent research paper in economics or natural language processing (NLP).

PROGRAM

Part I: Overview

Part II: Dictionaries

Part III: Tokenization & Distance

Part IV: Unsupervised and Supervised ML with Text

Part V: Word Embeddings and Linguistic Parsing

Part VI: Embedding Sequences with Attention

Part VII: Generative AI; and Using Transformers for YOUR Research

Part IX: Image Data in Business & Economics

Part X: Audio Data in Business & Economics

Part XI: Ethical Considerations