The course consists in 12 sessions of two 2 hours each. Each session consists in a lecture followed by one or two student presentations and discussions, each one based on an academic paper (with slides). Slides that will be used for the lectures and PDF copies of the academic papers to be discussed will be circulated in advance.

The list of papers to be presented will be circulated in the first session. For their presentations, the students must adopt the viewpoint of the author of the paper. The objective is to convince the audience on different points:

• The question is relevant and the hypotheses are sound
• The paper is well related to the existing literature and could fill a knowledge gap
• The methods and data used are appropriate, and the data sources are clearly presented
• The results appear robust and relevant

The presentation of the paper does not need to be structured in the same way as the original paper.

The course evaluation has four components:

• The first component is the presentation of a paper (oral presentation and PPT 30%)
• The second component is a short report presenting the same paper (30%
• The third component is a short report presenting a second paper (30%)
• The fourth component aims at assessing the individual contributions to the discussion (10%)