EC4201 - anyone doing it/done it?

[womble chris]

is it just me, or is this the hardest module yet. admittedly my lecture attendance wasnt great....but still, this is ridiculous.

just had to rant.

[Superiorjames]

Quoting womble chris from 17:45, 6th Jan 2007
is it just me, or is this the hardest module yet. admittedly my lecture attendance wasnt great....but still, this is ridiculous.

just had to rant.

Exam time just wouldn't be the same without a rant about EC!??! by womble chris...

[womble chris]

indeed i do have the urge to rant about economics, mainly becuase im always screwed for the exams.

have you looked over tutorial 3 for thoernissons stuff - the maths in that is unbelievable. ive written it down and think ill just try to memorise the final equation and write that down. ive never done a partial derivative in my life and apparantly that is some of the 'prelim' we're supposed to know. jokes.

im shortly going to start going over planning a few essays as they are worth 30% each and seem pretty alright (assuming same questions come up). but the maths is stupid - so much stuff and you get asked you 2 questions for each lecturer. the last two topics for la mannas stuff are so odd - moral hazard and signalling.

i wont start revising for the other two till after this ec4201, leaving me an evening and a day for ec4505 and 4 days for econometrics 2 by which time ill of had a mental breakdown.

cant wait till these are over.

how are you finding it?

[theyahyahyahs]

Quoting superiorjames from 18:10, 6th Jan 2007

Quoting womble chris from 17:45, 6th Jan 2007
is it just me, or is this the hardest module yet. admittedly my lecture attendance wasnt great....but still, this is ridiculous.

just had to rant.

Exam time just wouldn't be the same without a rant about EC!??! by womble chris...

Agreed. Out of interest Womble Chris has all your worrying in the past been justified? I mean, have your worse fears of an exam been confirmed by getting a shit mark?

[womble chris]

Quoting theyahyahyahs from 18:04, 8th Jan 2007

Quoting superiorjames from 18:10, 6th Jan 2007

Quoting womble chris from 17:45, 6th Jan 2007
is it just me, or is this the hardest module yet. admittedly my lecture attendance wasnt great....but still, this is ridiculous.

just had to rant.

Exam time just wouldn't be the same without a rant about EC!??! by womble chris...

Agreed. Out of interest Womble Chris has all your worrying in the past been justified? I mean, have your worse fears of an exam been confirmed by getting a shit mark?

i looked back briefly, when i said 'is it possible to get the golden 11 in ec2002', well for me, it wasnt, i got a 9.9, but i still got through into honours.

and yeah i tink they always have been justified. its take a huge amount of time to learn up all this stuff, and i believe the lecturers assume we understand it far better than we do. for example, rather than being able to logically think what is the next step in this line of equations, i have to try to memorize the steps, becuase often they make little sense.

a lot of it is badly explained as well i think. whenever i come up to the end point before an exam, if i feel okay about it all, i think i could of explained things far better than the lecturers can, becuase they clearly skip over some points too much.


anyways, one odd part about the module marking system is this. im on a 14.8 so far (16.4 3rd year 1st semester and 13.2 3nd semester). 5 of my 6 modules have been 2.1s or 1st.

so i need mean 12.2 this year. now in this set of exams, if i get 13, 13 and 11 (say 13s in 15 credit modules and 11 in 30 credit module, that means in mean terms i need to get 12.4 second semester, as i will of had a mean of 12 in 1st semester)

but if i get 13.5, 13.5, 10.5, so same mean average, all i need is 10.5 mean average next semester, a dorp of 1.9!!! this is becuase i would then have 7 of the 9 modules 13.5 or above, and so my medium will no matter what be above 13.5 so i only need a mean of 13 rather than 13.5

while ill love this system if i can get two 13.5s, i wont like it if say i get 11s, 12s and 13-13.4s

i am in a worse shape this time for exams than i was for 3rd year 2nd semester, so if i can get one 13.5 that'll be nice, 2 ill be chuffed.

im trying to learn a way to memorise one of the likely essay questions. my way of remember the points is:

FIMP
DV
TP
DC
WIGCRSP
IV
CV
MRC
OM

oh yeahhhh....fun.....ill do another 2 more of these for another couple of essays. it means hopefully i dont brain freeze in the exam.

as for the 4 maths questions, they will be hard i think.

[womble chris]

also, to anyone doing ec4201, do you think its very likely, as i do, that RBC model will be asked about in the first essay question and asymmetric info will be asked in the second essay?

not only are they in the 2 past papers, but they also cover a lot of each topic, so it hopefully should come up

given my lack of knowledge in a lot of the maths questions, im thinking of just preparing two essay questions, as above, and trying to learn some of the maths now.

in case you were wondering, the above acronym is for the rbc model, starting at its definition to going to the ways to improvement money addition. i havent learnt it yet, but hopefully i will of done. im just about to do the same for asymmetric info.

[Superiorjames]

Quoting womble chris from 20:36, 8th Jan 2007
also, to anyone doing ec4201, do you think its very likely, as i do, that RBC model will be asked about in the first essay question and asymmetric info will be asked in the second essay?

not only are they in the 2 past papers, but they also cover a lot of each topic, so it hopefully should come up

given my lack of knowledge in a lot of the maths questions, im thinking of just preparing two essay questions, as above, and trying to learn some of the maths now.

in case you were wondering, the above acronym is for the rbc model, starting at its definition to going to the ways to improvement money addition. i havent learnt it yet, but hopefully i will of done. im just about to do the same for asymmetric info.

Yeah mate, there isnt anything you can really ask about the RBC model except an essay question, given that the derivations within the mathematics are too advanced for economics students. I have prepared an essay plan for that topic which pretty much covers any question he could feasibly ask. Looking into la manna's material, id say asymmetric information is also pretty likely to feature in the essay question. Lectures 5-9 all cover that so chances are, he will ask something related to that. What have you considered that he may ask on asymmetric info? Its a bit less clear cut than with the RBC model stuff. Have you thought about any other essays he may ask too?

How is the maths going? Thoenissens isnt too problematic, most of la manna's is ok too except the moral hazard section. The problem with his side of the course is that the maths questions all vary in their technicalities, much more than with thoenissen where the questions are always based upon the same thing.

Hope its going well mate, long night ahead?

[womble chris]

Quoting superiorjames from 22:55, 9th Jan 2007
Yeah mate, there isnt anything you can really ask about the RBC model except an essay question, given that the derivations within the mathematics are too advanced for economics students. I have prepared an essay plan for that topic which pretty much covers any question he could feasibly ask. Looking into la manna's material, id say asymmetric information is also pretty likely to feature in the essay question. Lectures 5-9 all cover that so chances are, he will ask something related to that. What have you considered that he may ask on asymmetric info? Its a bit less clear cut than with the RBC model stuff. Have you thought about any other essays he may ask too?

How is the maths going? Thoenissens isnt too problematic, most of la manna's is ok too except the moral hazard section. The problem with his side of the course is that the maths questions all vary in their technicalities, much more than with thoenissen where the questions are always based upon the same thing.

Hope its going well mate, long night ahead?

good analysis id say. as for the RBC model, he could ask 5 different variations of the question, either way im just writing down my points and then at the end of most of the unrelated points ill blag some way how it links to the question.

As for the asymmetric info question, im guessing it'll be along the lines of 'why does it cause non-optimal solutions, give examples, and possible how can some of them be fixed'. As for other essays i really dont have a clue. Maybe something along the lines of 'explain the logic and applicability of the bayes nash equlilibrium and the perfect NE'. if i had to answer that i may stretch to two sentences. I guess any other possible lecture will be focused on a particular lecture.

Maths is going slow. very slow. ive tried to go over thoesnissens stuff, the solow - cant really remember it off the top of my head hopefully i will come exam, the ramsey - ive got used to the phase diagrams and trying to remember MPPl MPPk. Two sector model maths is sodding hard when it asks the question about doing partial derivatives so ive ignored that as i guess e cant ask that and just learnt how to get to the two k = sk/n+d+g + h thing and n+d+g/sh

but i dont see how he gets sk on the numerator for k.=0 yet sh as the denominator given they are identical equations for the depreciation of k and h bar one says sk and the other sh. i may try to learn the tutorial answer he does for the RBC model, becuase i honestly cant see where his other maths question is coming from, unless he does the AK one again. one thing i want to learn is that weird ponzi game lecture slide. sods law it'll come up and ive always meant to try to decode that.

agree that the moral hazard is a right bitch. signalling ive just learnt from one of his tutorial answers, still to learn properly though.

i think my plan till the exam is just to go over my two essays a lot and go over agency models, ramsey models for 2 maths questions and hope i can blag something for whatever else is asked.

it's going to suck becuase im pretty sure my maths questions will go wrong becuase although i understand them i cant regurgitate them for the essays im not too confident over the asymmetric trying to remember different graphs, what the outcomes are etc.

trying to fall asleep is going to be tricky, ill keep thinking 'oh fuck, how do you answer an insurance/signalling/solow/two sector/list goes on to cover 95% of the module question'

[womble chris]

ah crap. just started looking at la manna's tutorials (not sure why i havent before, only used examples in his notes really). i cant do any of them, seriously, like i cant do the 'very easy' ones.

[Superiorjames]

So, that is the end of macro and microeconomics...forever. What is your assessment mr womble? Any closing remarks on the exam?!

[womble chris]

Quoting superiorjames from 22:03, 10th Jan 2007
So, that is the end of macro and microeconomics...forever. What is your assessment mr womble? Any closing remarks on the exam?!

closing remarks would be along the lines of 'oh bollocks'. it went even worse than i was expecting. i had an initial glimmer of hope when i sat down and could see through the question paper that the 1st question would be on the ramsey model graph, but that hope was quashed as soon as i read on. i saw the 2nd question and thought 'yeah, thats doable', then i saw the rbc word in the essay and thought 'good', flicking over to la manna's i went to the essay question and thought 'why you dick, why, where the fuck is asymmetric information'. i read the first essay choice and knew instantly i didnt have a clue about it, and seeing the words 'bayesian nash equilibirum' for the second essay choice i knew things werent looking good. i saw the 2nd maths question and seeing the word 'effort' (which i knew was for moral hazard) meant i knew i couldnt really do that maths question.

so after 5 mins looking at the paper, i started. Q1 maths - i initially fucked up by doing it in the wrong direction, but i think i got the first 3 parts correct, although my explanation for G movements were close to non existent. The 4th part i really didnt know much about. 2nd question i initially thought would be good, but it turned out a bit sour. i derived one of the parts fine and could do the graphs, but i didnt know how to derive differently given a+b=1 vs a+b<1. also, for the last part, i really didnt know what to say except that a+b=1 means there is no steady state.

on to the rbc model essay and i was a bit unsure what 'salient' meant, but i didnt really care, i was writing down my planned rbc model essay answer regardless of what the question was asking. then la manna's first question. i might as well of left it blank. i didnt have a clue and wrote some absolute crap. then for the 2nd question - this really bugged me as i knew i had done it once before, but i simply couldnt remember. i tried about three different approaches, none of them worked whatsoever, so i put a note to la manna saying something like 'i have got confused here but hope some of it is of use' aka ive written down a few method, none of which are right and dont give me any answer, but please give me some method marks'. for the last essay question i wrote what little i knew about the bayesian nash equilibrium. i then laid the smackdown on the insurance part about why it can be preferable to offer partial insurance - i knew graphs for that. then for the 3rd part of it, i had a small idea of how to answer it, the quality distortion. i remembered doing some practice question about airlines and that standard class get worse quality than what they were originally able to pay for. given i couldnt remember whether this was relevant, or how to actually answer the question anyway, i started with 'the best way to explain this is by using an airline example'. not a convincing start, but i really wasnt sure what the answer was supposed to be.

so that was that. all in all, i wasnt expecting anything great, but was hopeful of maybe getting 2 good essays done and getting correct 2 maths. intead, i got 1 good essay, 1 maths pretty good, 1 okay, 2 complete shite, and the other essay a bit mixed. im hoping i came out with an 11 so that i average around a 12 (going in with a 14 in coursework). but in all honestly i really could of got lower mark 8-11.

anyways, at least it over. it was satisfying going back to my room and putting all the notes and rough paper into a bag and thinking - fuck you notes, go fuck yourselves. now im trying to learn the environmental economics module. given i went to a total of zero lectures for this module, its proving a struggle - its on friday morning. joyyyyyyyyyy.


good luck with revision for issues. how did you find it?