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Research in the Department of Economics - Core Areas

The research in the Department of Economics covers three core areas in economics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics.  Besides economics, the Department also has a group within demography.

In microeconomics the main activity is within applied welfare theory.  The Department has for a long period done research in environmental and natural resource economics, and more recently in health economics.  There is also research on topics such as regulation and industrial economics, and on taxation and other aspects of public economics.  Optimal control theory and economic applications of this is an active research area.  There is also theoretical research in game theory and the economics of information. The Department has to some extent been using experimental methods to test microeconomic hypotheses.

In macroeconomics the topics that have received most attention are labour economics, monetary policy, pensions and savings decisions, income distribution, political economics and development issues.  An important topic is the future of the Nordic welfare states.  Theoretical models which are used differ with respect to heterogeneity and institutional detail. Different methodological and empirical approaches are represented in a fruitful interchange of ideas.  These include macroeconometrics, calibration of stochastic dynamic models, and vector autoregressive models.

The research on new methods in econometrics is concentrated around panel data estimation, errors-in-variables estimation, aggregation, discrete choice and simulation based inference.  Some of the applied research is also concentrated on application of new methods, such as in labour supply and retirement behaviour, equilibrium-correction models and cointegration.

There are no strict borders between these three broad core areas.  Econometrics is used both in microeconomics and macroeconomics.  Newer developments in macroeconomics rely to an increasing extent on theories developed in microeconomics, and some topics, such as political economics, are difficult to classify as one or the other.