ECON 4195

This was a class with a ton of potential, but it felt slightly off this semester. Basically, the semester is split into four chunks of lectures from Ciliberto and Aryal. They can both lecture pretty well, and were really nice and helpful during office hours. During each chunk you get a homework from that professor. These varied wildly in difficulty and length, idk if that was normal or if it was just weird this time around. Over the course of the semester, you have to work on a case study and a paper. The case study is pretty fun, you get a group and have to make an argument about some economic topic(for example, we talked about collusion in the meatpacking industry and colleges), culminating with your final day in class being like a court case. The paper, is kinda strange in that it's an empirical class but you aren't required to do empirical work for it, but if you put a lot of work into it it's a really good experience in doing economic research. Overall, I enjoyed the class even though it sometimes felt like it wasn't planned very well.

Great course if you want to get an (almost) free A, but not much good for anything else. The course in general feels kinda disjointed, as it's co-taught by professors (Ciliberto and Aryal) who don't seem to be very well in sync. They switch off lectures and basically deliver truncated sections of Ciliberto's industrial organization course and Aryal's auctions course. There also aren't any exams, and the content is irrelevant to most of the actual work you do in the class, so there isn't much of an incentive to learn this stuff. It comes up in homework a few times, but those are usually fairly simple.
Most of the grade (50%) is simply a paper which is graded in checkpoints. Most of these are fairly easy as long as you write something, but the entire semester you're basically working on a project that can be entirely irrelevant to what you're doing in class. You also don't end up actually doing any "empirical" work with real data, which makes it kinda weird.
The same goes for the case study (15%), for which you work with a team to create a presentation arguing on some antitrust case. Sounds interesting, but even though every month or so there will be a check-in of sorts where class is cancelled for a work day (which is nice, but imagine a real class doing this lol) when you can ask for feedback, you don't actually have to do anything substantial until the very end of the semester. As such, it ends up feeling very disconnected both from any kind of accountability or the class content itself.
I was excited to take this course because I enjoyed Ciliberto's theoretical IO class, but I left having learned much less than I expected and with considerably less interest in empirical economics than I did before.

Really engaging course, you learn a lot about how research is actually done in economics. Also, a really easy A.