Master programme in Philosophy and Economics

Courses that could fulfil the qualitative admission requirements in Philosophy (15 ECTS) are usually offered by the philosophy department of your home university. Particularly suitable are courses in:

• Ethics/Moral Philosophy,
• Political philosophy, Philosophy of Rationality and Action, and
• Philosophy of Science and Social Science, including Philosophy of Economics.

Strong applications tend to have at least one course on these topics.

Topic-based courses (such as general introductory courses like "Introduction to Moral Philosophy" or more focused courses like "Feminist epistemology") give you better overview knowledge and are thus preferable to narrowly text-focused courses, such as "Kant’s Groundwork").

Note on political philosophy: These courses are also sometimes offered by political science departments, under the heading "political theory" (or "Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte"). These courses should consider either contemporary topics such as equality, freedom, democracy, and justice, or historical topics, e.g. the political philosophies of Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, or Mill.

If you are looking for courses in Economics that fulfil the 15 ECTS qualitative admission requirements you want to focus on courses that touch upon the mathematical side of Economics. At least one of them should involve mathematical modelling. For a strong application we highly recommend that the courses you provide include at least two of the listed below:

• Principles of Economics
  • The course ideally covers, at a very introductory level, a selection of the topics we listed under "Introductory Microeconomics", "Introductory Macroeconomics" and "Introductory Game Theory".
  • The course evaluation ideally assesses your familiarity with a few basic mathematical models (e.g., preference maximization and graphical market models).
• Introductory Microeconomics
  • The course ideally covers topics such as (a) consumer theory, (b) theory of the firm, and (c) competitive equilibrium.
  • The course evaluation ideally assesses your familiarity with basic mathematical microeconomic models, for instance: (a) models of rational decision making, as applied to consumers (preference maximization) and as applied to firms (profit maximization), (b) models of market interactions (perfect competition, oligopoly, monopoly).
• Introductory Macroeconomics
  • The course ideally covers topics such as (a) national accounts, (b) economic growth, and (c) business cycles.
  • The course evaluation ideally assesses your familiarity with basic mathematical macroeconomic models, for instance: (a) national accounts tables, (b) a simple model of growth (e.g., Solow-Swan), and (c) a simple RBC model (e.g., Kydland & Prescott).
• Introductory Game Theory
  • The course ideally covers topics such as (a) static games, (b) sequential games, and (c) strategies and solution concepts (e.g., iterated deletion of dominated strategies, Nash equilibrium, backward induction).
  • The course evaluation ideally assesses your familiarity with basic game theoretical models, for instance: (a) strategic (a.k.a. normal) form of a game (i.e., the payoff matrix), (b) extended form of a game (i.e., game tree), and (c) best response functions.