Harvard University-Topics in Property Right and Economic Development

Goals

How is property right theory related to economic development? Through this re- search program, students are introduced to the property right theory perspective of social and economic activities. Students will read papers in the frontier of microeconomic theory and learn to use data to testify hypothesis. By the end of the program, students will have the literature knowledge and technical foundations to pursue their own research ideas.

The tentative plan is to:

1. Learn how to systematically look for and read literature;

2. Try to learn how to get public data on a related topic or design questionnaire to collect data;

3. Learn how to use software like STATA/R to analyze the data and get empirical conclusions;

4. Formulate your own question and explore the answer under guidance { so you experience the research process and discover its excitement and frustration.

Property Right Theory and Economic Development. Property right theory is the classical field in economic research and this is the very field where many Nobel Prize winners in Economics come from. In this topic, we systematically study the impact of property right in economic development and it’s effect on many economic aspects: like urbanization, rural-urban income disparity and the institution reform in the rural area in China.

Prerequisites

As the program is mostly self-contained, it is not necessary to have previous exposure to property right theory or even economics. However, some advanced mathematical knowledge is indispensable to understanding the materials and ultimately proving theorems of your own. The detailed requirements are listed below:

1. calculus: especially how to take derivatives to maximize a function

2. basic probability theory: random variables, their expectations, variances and covariances; uniform, binomial and normal distributions; definitions of interval estimation and significance.

3. basic statistical software: R, Stata