International School Of Economics

MA in Economics

ISET's MA program in Economics was launched in fall 2006 as a graduate program at Tbilisi State University. The program takes students through a challenging, two-year curriculum, comparable in content and quality to the first two years of study in reputable Ph.D. programs in North America and Western Europe. All courses are taught in English by highly-qualified international faculty.

Our faculty is diverse, comprising resident professors with Ph.D.s from universities such as Columbia University, Hebrew University and the University of Pennsylvania, and regular visitors who are world leaders in their fields, including several Fellows of the Econometric Society. The entire faculty is committed to helping students design individual study plans, supervising their thesis research, and supporting their applications for both professional jobs and Ph.D. studies abroad. The quality of research and teaching at ISET is guaranteed by the International Faculty Committee, which brings together the ISET faculty and prominent academics from around the world.

How is the program structured?

In the first year, all students take the same four economics courses (Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Statistics/Econometrics, and Mathematics for Economists), plus supplementary English/Academic Writing courses taught at three different levels for the whole duration of the first year.

In the second year, students are given the possibility to draw up an individual plan of elective courses. These electives are taught by highly-qualified and internationally-recognized resident and visiting faculty. They cover a wide spectrum of fields like energy economics, environmental economics, labor economics, resource economics, experimental economics, industrial organization, mechanism design, game theory, finance, health economics, education economics, advanced macro, advanced econometrics, development economics, cost-benefit analysis, program evaluation, advanced mathematics, time series, agricultural economics, open economy macro, economic growth, financial econometrics, topics in macroeconomics, among other fields. A star-studded list of visiting professors teaching some of the elective and core courses at ISET included professors from Bonn University, Chicago University, City University of New York, Stanford University, Hebrew University, Warwick University, Western Ontario University, University of Pennsylvania, to name just a few.

Students are required to demonstrate mastery of technical research skills by writing and defending a master's thesis or literature critique, applying the tools they acquired in their studies. The master's thesis represents a significant piece of independent economic research while the literature critique critically reviews and interprets current economic research. Both types of writing projects are on a topic chosen by the student with guidance from faculty.

In the second-year, students can choose to enroll in one of the concentrations offered at ISET (and thus tailor their study plan, with the help of their faculty advisor, to suit their needs and meet the concentration requirements). The currently-offered concentrations at ISET include "Agricultural Economics", "Energy Economics and Natural Resources Management", "Macroeconomic Policy", "Private Sector Development", "Human Resources Economics" and "Economic Theory". The subject of the students’ writing project (thesis or critique) has to be related to their concentration.

The curriculum is supplemented by internships, faculty-led research projects, and frequent opportunities to interact with policymakers and practitioners.