Economics 590: Introduction to Quantitative Economics, fall 2008


Instructor: Jeremy Sandford

Office hour: Tuesday, 4-5pm
Lecture: TH 9:30-11:45am, 314 B&E
Exam dates: Thursday, October 16th (in class), and Monday, December 15th from 10:30-12:30 (B&E 314)

syllabus,     set notation appendix,     notes on how to write proofs

Required course book: "A first course in optimization theory," by Rangarajan Sundaram

2007 class website

Readings to date: Sundaram pages 1-65, chapters 2-8, 11-12


Schedule


Monday, December 15, Final Exam, 10:30am
Last year's final (updated 12/11)

Thursday, December 11: No class

Tuesday, December 9: contraction mapping theorem and its relation to dynamic programming problems

Thursday, December 4: existence of a value function and the contraction mapping theorem

Tuesday, December 2: more infinite-horizon dynamic programming
Homework 11, Answers

Thursday, November 27: No class

Tuesday, November 25: Begin infinite-horizon dynamic programming: guess and verify

Thursday, November 20: More practice with finite-horizon dynamic programming

Tuesday, November 18: More finite-horizon dynamic programming
Homework 10, answers

Thursday, November 13: Quasiconcavity and optimization, dynamic programming intro

Tuesday, November 11: Concavity, quasiconcavity, and optimization
Homework 9, Some answers

Thursday, November 6: Concavity and optimization

Tuesday, November 4: No class
Homework 8, answers

Thursday, October 30: inequality-constrained problems

Tuesday, October 28: Multiple equality constraints, inequality-constrained problems
Homework 7, Some answers

Thursday, October 23: Equality-constrained optimization, conditions for applying Lagrange multiplier method

Tuesday, October 21: Equality-constrained optimization, Lagrange multiplier method, examples
Homework 6

Thursday, October 16: Midterm, answers

Tuesday, October 14: Unconstrained optimization

Thursday, October 9: Unconstrained optimization, first and second order conditions, Weierstrass redux

Tuesday, October 7: Directional derivatives, derivatives of functions with codomain R^m

Thursday, October 2: Taylor's theorem, derivatives of functions on R^n

Tuesday, September 30: The derivative of real-valued functions
Homework 5, Answers

Thursday, September 25: limsup, liminf, limits of functions, continuity

Tuesday, September 23: Sequences
Homework 4, answers

Thursday, September 18: Weierstrass theorem (Sundaram, chapters 2 and 3)

Tuesday, September 16: Open and closed sets, finite, countable, and uncountable sets
Homework 3, answers

Thursday, September 11: Euclidean metric, open and closed sets

Tuesday, September 9: orders, metric spaces, the Euclidean metric
Homework 2, some answers

Thursday, September 4: functions and their properties

Tuesday, September 2: complements, convexity, functions

Thursday, August 28: Introduction, sets and their properties
Homework 1, partial answers