EC4306 Applied Microeconomic Analysis
Content
Auctions, winner’s curse, and matching problems
First half of the semester, we learned about the different types of auctions (first-price auction, second-price auction, english auction) and the bidding strategies in each of these auctions. And winner’s curse, which is the tendency for the winning bid to be larger than the “true value” of the object.
Second half of the semester was all about matching. One-to-one matching with 2-sided preferences, one-to-one matching with one-sided preferences, one-to-many matching with 2-sided preferences, etc. For example – how to match a man and a woman together in a marriage problem, or how to match individuals to houses, schools to students, courses to students, etc.
Exams
Class Participation 10%
Midterm Exam 40%
Final Exam 50%
Personal Experience
Love-hate relationship with this module. Love because the content was easy + no homework assignments (well, there are but you don’t have to hand those in) + no group projects, hate because the lecturer was so dull and classes were so uninteresting. Definitely the most boring class of my semester. I swear, I end up dozing off every Thursday at some point or another during this class. Even with coffee.
The prof is really really long-winded. He’ll spend 30-40 minutes rambling about something that can be easily explained in 10 minutes or less. It’s just like a loop. Round and round he goes, when he stops talking nobody knows… like c’mon, I already understood you the first three times you said it. You don’t have to repeat it 3091402938402384029384 times. He can spend two whole hours on just 3 simple slides which could probably be covered in less than 30 minutes.
Prof is also super unhelpful. I emailed him asking one homework assignment-related question a few days before the midterm exam and his only reply was to “post it on the forum” where we were meant to “have a healthy and fruitful discussion”, which by the way was also completely dead. Thanks a lot, much appreciated.
And lastly, the midterm and final exams were so ridiculously easy it kinda irritated me. Especially with a small class size of 20, and we’re still being graded on a bell curve. Obviously everyone’s gonna do well so a single mark will make all the difference between getting an A or A-.
Grade
A
EC4307 Issues in Macroeconomics
Content
Basic consumption-saving model, basic asset pricing, real business cycles
Exams
Assignments 20%
Case Study 30% (15% for the presentation, 15% for the report)
Midterm Exam 40%
Class Participation 10%
Personal Experience
Easy module. It’s basically like EC2102 all over again. The content is very, very similar. Taught by Jo In-Hwan, who imo is a really good lecturer. He explains everything in a clear and concise manner, and doesn’t ramble on and bore you to death.
The midterm was not easy but not ridiculously difficult. There wasn’t enough time given and I (along with many other people) didn’t manage to complete the paper. When the prof announced “10 minutes left” towards the end of the exam, one student sitting in front of me in the lecture theatre kept muttering “fk la… fk la…. fk la….” under his breath and had I not been busy scribbling like a madwoman and trying to leave as little blanks as possible, I’d have laughed lol.
For the group project, each group had to select a country and write a 1500-word report on the country’s economy (one main macroeconomic problem in the economy + causes + proposed solutions). The only difficult thing about the entire project was keeping to the short 1500-word limit.
Grade
A
EC4332 Money and Banking II
Content
Bank run models, shadow banking, delegated monitoring, bank capital, market debt and bank loan models, etc. Basically all about banks.
Exams
Class Participation 10%
Homework Assignments 10%
Group Project 30%
Midterm Exam 10%
Final Exam 40%
Personal Experience
Probably the most difficult level 4000 Econs module I’ve taken to date. The prof mentioned that the previous semester, the class was so easy that students complained about it during the feedback. So he decided to increase the difficulty. Yay thanks.
I literally spent the entire weekend trying to do the first homework assignment (there are a total of 4 assignments) and I just about died doing it. But the good thing is, I understood each topic better after struggling through the assignments. And once I understood it, I was like, damn, why was I even struggling to complete it initially? This is such a simple concept/thing to understand and do… Same process for every single assignment. Struggle and die in the process of doing it and then looking back, realise that it’s actually not as difficult as I thought it to be.
The group project… it was the most complicated/tedious group project compared to my group projects for the other level 4000 modules. We spent SO MUCH TIME extracting and collecting the data (the liquid assets, total loans, core deposits, loan commitments, equity capital, non-performing loans, etc for 100 different banks) and less than one week before the due date of the report… we realised that we had collected the data wrongly. So we had to redo it completely. I spent two whole days glued to my computer doing the data extraction. I think my eyes nearly fell out of my head after those two days… seriously, my eyes never felt so tired before. And even after we re-did the data collection, we had to analyse the results. All within that week. Ugh. That is not something I want to go through again.
The midterm and final exam was okay. But I didn’t manage to finish the final exam paper on time. It wasn’t all that easy and there just wasn’t enough time.
Grade
A-
EC4394 Behavioral Economics
Content
Expected utility, prospect theory, loss aversion, reference-dependence, endowment effect, time preference (exponential, quasi-hyperbolic and hyperbolic discounting), self-control problems, other-regarding preference, dark side of economics incentives, behavioural games and inequity, neuroeconomics, gift exchange, behavioural economics of saving
Exams
Group Presentation 10%
Group Homework 10%
Group Project 15%
Class Participation 5%
Final Exam 60%
Personal Experience
I had a bad initial impression of this module. This module was taught by Prof Zhong Songfa and in the beginning I found it really difficult to understand his accent. I would be like ???? what did he just say ????? what word was that ?????. Yeah it was pretty bad.
But I started going for lectures prepared and that helped. Prof Zhong will usually upload the lecture slides and readings for that particular lecture a few days before the class. So I would read the required reading as well as the supplementary readings if I had the time (and trust me, the readings are freaking long and boring as fk and usually difficult to digest.) so that on the day of the class itself, it was much much easier for me to follow the prof’s lecture.
For the group presentation – each group was assigned a particular reading to present. And it was not an easy reading…. it took me 3 whole days to be able to understand 90% of the reading. Thereafter we had to do up the presentation slides and present the reading to the class. My group was rather disorganised. There wasn’t any communication at all, we didn’t meet up IRL or even online through Skype or anything. All we did was do up the slides on Google Slides and assign parts to present, and I had no idea how their scripts sounded like until the actual presentation day itself. Plus on the day of the presentation, two of our group members were saying they still didn’t understand the reading at all. All in all, it was a pretty cui presentation.
For the group project – each group had to write a research paper. On what, you ask? This was the most difficult part imo. Thinking of a topic to write about. According to the uploaded syllabus: “as behavioral economics emphasizes on the interplay between theory and experimental/empirical evidence, your project could be about either theory, experiment, or both.” And that’s it. You can literally choose any topic under the sun as long as it’s related to behavioural economics.
Again my group was rather disorganised for this. We didn’t decide on the topic until literally one week before the deadline. And then we had two freeloaders in our group of 5 who did literally nothing and contributed nothing to the report on google docs. Myself and my two other group members typed all 15 pages without a single line of contribution from the other two. And no, I am not exaggerating. You know how you can see the edit history on Google Docs, and see who has done exactly what? Those two did literally NOTHING except on the day of submission, only to key their own names onto the cover page of the report.
I’ve had bad group mates before but this was the first time I witnessed something so extreme. Literally they contributed NOTHING to the entire 15 page report. Had I been a little meaner I’d have sent in an email to the prof along with the video evidence.
Group homework – the prof assigned us all 4 assignments over the span of the semester, which can be submitted as a group. Personally I really disliked this – not everyone’s going to have the same answers and obviously you’re going to have to compromise, I can’t be insisting that everyone follow my answers. So yeah, I’d much rather have preferred individual submissions. And also that one group member of ours who did zilch for the group project, also did zilch for the group homework. Everyone else would upload their answers on whatsapp but he? Nada.
Grade
A+
LOL WTF. I was honestly shocked when I saw the results, especially considering the fact that our group presentation (and slides) had been so cui in comparison with all the other groups. I guess having a 60% final exam helped.
GEK2008 Environmental History
Content
Hunting-gathering and the agricultural revolution, columbian exchange, industrialising agriculture and slaughter, the green revolution, food security, GMOs, disease, classifying nature, imperial botany, gender and the environment, environmental movements, conservation vs preservation, history of dogs in Singapore
Exams
IVLE Forum Discussion 20%
2 Writing Assignments 40% (20% each)
Final Exam 40%
Personal Experience
Personally I found this module really interesting, and it helps that Prof Barnard is pretty entertaining and funny as well. There are no lecture slides or notes uploaded on IVLE, and since there are no webcasts you really do have to attend each lecture and take down your own notes or you most likely won’t be able to smoke your way through the final exam.
Finals was pretty easy as well. Basically, we just had to write short essays on a particular topic, which could be about anything from a person to a disease to an event. An example question would be “The Black Death OR The Irish Potato Famine” and you’d choose one of the two topics to write a short essay on.
Probably my favourite GEM module ever.
Grade
A
theoryoflies 