ktx6's blog

I blinked, and the entire third termester flew by. I apologize for the lack of updates - I'm blaming a break in the pipes that send internets from my house to the university. I'll try to summarize how it all went, but honestly, I'm trying to repress those memories like the ones of gym class in junior high, and so things might be a bit fuzzy.

I blinked, and the entire third termester flew by. I apologize for the lack of updates - I'm blaming a break in the pipes that send internets from my house to the university. I'll try to summarize how it all went, but honestly, I'm trying to repress those memories like the ones of gym class in junior high, and so things might be a bit fuzzy.

Do you remember IT? Some people may have referred to "IT" as Ginger?

I had an incredibly interesting conversation last night about price discrimination (yes, I am being somewhat facetious about the incredibly part... but only somewhat). Price discrimination, for those who don't like to use jargon, is when the seller of a good charges some people one price for the good, and others another price. My initial reaction whenever I hear of this is to say, "Why the hell would I pay more for the same thing than someone else?", but it's actually quite common.

For the first time in the program thus far, the Master's students get to choose their classes for the next two terms. The power of our future is in our hands... sort of. I have to qualify that statement because in the next two terms there are two required classes which leaves only two open slots, and the Econ department has only three classes to choose from. Still, some choice is better than no choice at all, and we also have the opportunity to take MBA classes or environmental economics, but I'm basically ignoring those because I'm not personally interested in them.

At the end of this term, everyone in the Master's program has to write a paper for our econometrics class. The paper can be about anything, which is one of the reasons I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with a topic. The one requirement is that the paper has to use multiple regression - so, basically, you need to create an equation where one variable is affected by many others.

In our econometrics class, we recently read an article (Pay and Performance in MLB) that attempted to calculate the 'worth' of a baseball player and see how that compared to his salary. In order to determine 'worth', the authors first calculated how this one player affected the team's batting average, or, for a pitcher, the strikeout to walk ratio.

I was looking forward to this coming weekend, when I realized that we have a HW and a quiz on Monday, plus an exam and a 20 page paper due on Tuesday. Now it looks like the weekend will be spent getting intimate with my macro and micro books. Ah, the joys of grad school. So is this blog helping with recruitment? How many potential graduate students out there are looking forward to weekends spent studying?

One requirement of the Master’s program is that students attend a weekly seminar where economists (some from UNH, some from other schools, some from elsewhere) present research papers. This gives students a great opportunity to see what economists actually do (other than teach economics), and to get ideas on potential research topics for our papers. Some of these presentations are way over my head – lots of complicated equations and formulae that I’ve never heard of – but if you don’t worry too much about the details, you can usually understand the general ideas and applications.