Teaching

Please find additional information on current courses in the university's course directory. You can find the archives of former semesters there too. Link

Course material will be provided on ADAM the official Learning Platform at the University of Basel. ADAM facilitates the distribution of content, collaboration and communication among students and teachers as well as among research and administrative staff. Link

The faculty's external lecturers can be found at <link de fakultaet personen lehrbeauftragte internal link in current>Link.

Spring Term

 43496-01 Seminar Bachelorarbeit in Energy and Climate Policy

The purpose of this seminar is to guide you through the process of planning and completing your bachelor's thesis. For those of you who complete thesis with me would be working on a topic broadly within the realm of sustainability, energy, and climate policies. However, within this broad frame, students will identify his or her own specific research question by him/herself. The first two kick-of meetings (Feb 22 & 23) lay out what kind of issues might be there in the area of sustainability, energy and climate policies. This is why your attendance at these meetings will be extremely important. Identifying an important, relevant and interesting research question requires a tremendous amount of effort, but it is also a very creative and exciting process. I welcome students who are well motivated to engage in this process and those who are generally interested in these topic areas. More ...

50768-01 Kolloquium Methods in Economics: Survey Data Collection and Analytics

The course is intended as an applied method colloquium taught at the master’s level. The course welcomes motivated students who are willing to complete required readings beforehand, and discuss and participate actively in class with your peer. Creativity in thinking is always a little bit of a plus for survey- and survey-experiment oriented research. This partial module aims to prepare you for understanding good research involving a survey and a survey experiment. The course covers three major areas: (1) the nature of the survey response, including the typical psychology of attitude expressions and social desirability pressures; (2) general issues around quantitative survey research, including random and systematic measurement errors, and the logic of causal analysis; and (3) analyzing and interpreting treatment effects (for survey experiments) using an existing (but not your own) survey experiment data. The topical area covered in this colloquium is mostly within the realm of climate- and energy-related policy issues; however, this should not prevent you from learning survey research methodology, even if your research interests were in other topical areas such as marketing and international trade. We will use R for quantitative analyses. Energy and Climate Policy—Citizens’ Perspectives (VV-Nr: 43030) is not a strict requirement but highly recommended before taking this course. Basic knowledge of sampling and statistics would be useful. The final grade will be based on active participation, homework assignments and a final examination. More ...

43494-01 Kolloquium Survey Research Methodology

The course is intended as an applied method colloquium taught at the master’s level. The course welcomes very motivated students who are willing to complete required readings beforehand, and discuss and participate actively in class with your peer. Creativity in thinking is always a little bit of a plus for (online) survey-oriented research. This course aims to prepare you for conducting simple research and writing an academic paper, using survey or survey experiment methods. The course covers four major areas: (1) the nature of the survey response, including the typical psychology of attitude expressions, issues of question wording and context, and social desirability pressures; (2) general issues of quantitative research, including random and systematic measurement error, and the logic of causal analysis; (3) implementing online survey (experiments) with a convenience sample, and (4) analyzing and interpreting treatment effects (for survey experiments) and how/what to report. In the latter half of the colloquium, we will, collectively as a class, draft a survey experiment and field it with the university students. The topic of the class survey project will likely be within the realm of climate- and energy-related issues; however, this should not prevent you from learning survey research method even if your research interests were in other topical areas such as marketing and international trade. We will use Qualtrics as a survey software (which we will explore together in the course) and use R for simple effect analyses. Energy and Climate Policy—Citizens’ Perspectives (VV-Nr: 43030) is not a strict requirement but highly recommended before taking this course. Basic knowledge of sampling and statistics would be useful. More ...

Autumn Term

43030-01 Vorlesung Energy and Climate Policy - Citizens' Perspectives

We learn about on-going policy debates and academic research regarding (a) how people perceive these risks, benefits and costs associated with climate and energy policy, (b) what might be reasons for different perceptions across individuals, and (c) how these perceptions might influence their support and acceptance of new policies. We adopt theoretical frameworks from broader disciplines including economics, political science and psychology. Along the course, we also pay close attention to measuring techniques to analyze public opinion in- and outside these issue domains.

43029-01 Vorlesung International Political Economy of Energy and Climate Policy

The goal of this course is to provide an overview of issues associated with collective policy-making in climate and energy policy domains from political-economic perspectives.