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Huub Meijers
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Current positions Associate Professor of Economics at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics Current Courses Macroeconomics and Economic Policy (Course code EBC2040) This course elaborates the macroeconomic topics and theories that have been discussed in the first year. The central question always concerns the coordination between the goods market, the labour market and financial markets in a closed economy framework. Coordination failures play a central role in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations, providing roles for fiscal and monetary policy. The courses starts with a new Keynesian view of macroeconomics, developing theories and models for the short- and medium-run. In the second half we also address criticism to the new Keynesian view and introduce some alternatives. Using recent OECD Economic Outlooks, macroeconomic theory is applied to a wide variety of recent macroeconomic problems and policy dilemmas. Contending Perspectives in Economics: The Case of Inequality (University College, SSC2010) In recent years, the issue of rising inequality has dominated the media. People’s views on inequality are shaped by their perception of the world. Economists are no different. In this course, we will discuss various perspectives in economics such as Neoclassical, Austrian, Marxism, Post Keynesian, (New) Institutionalism and Feminist Economics. We will both focus on these perspectives within the field of economics as a scientific discipline and on how these perspectives differ in their view on inequality. According to some scholars, inequality is a natural phenomenon in a capitalist market economy. It is a fair reward for higher education and training. Some other scholars disagree with this view. They observe that the sharpest inequality stems from other sources than education, and it is not justified by individual merits alone. Further, they emphasize that inequality in itself has detrimental effects on societies and therefore it should be prevented as much as possible. Finally, some economists see inequality as the result of economic growth and therefore conclude that increases in societal wealth cannot be attained without inequality. In this course, we will first discuss the main elements within each school of thought, how they emerged and how they differ from each other. Secondly, we accompany these discussions with their view and interpretation of inequality. We discuss various perspectives in which inequality can be regarded such as the distribution of income amongst capitalists versus workers, income inequality between various groups in society and the difference between inequality in income versus inequality in wealth. How can we explain differences in society and are these differences persistent? Thirdly, we also touch upon different measures of inequality by using actual data and applying some (simple) indicators. This all will be discussed in tutorial meetings and students will work on (group) papers. We will present and discuss these papers for which we also include peer feedback. Previous Courses ICT, Labour and Inequality This course gives a brief introduction into the economics of technological change and the labour market. The main aim of this course is to understand the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on the demand for workers and on wages. What are the effects of ICT on (structures of) organisations; How does ICT impact wages and the division of labour? Do people with ICT skills earn higher wages? Intellectual Property Rights in a Network Society (Course Code EBC4026) This course deals with the economic aspects of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and provides insights into why various forms of IPRs such as patents, copyrights and trademarks are necessary to stimulate innovation. We will also look at how certain aspects of IPRs may hinder innovation. In the international context of IPRs, we will look at how IPRs influence the diffusion of knowledge between countries, for example from advanced countries to developing countries. In the context of standard setting, IPRs are important because they may block access to the standard. Subsequently the course moves to developments specific in the information society and discusses contemporary topics like (open source) software and creative commons. The final topic concerns policy design in a digital economy and includes cloud computing, smartphone industries and mobile internet. ICT, Innovation and Economic Performance (with Mark Vluggen, Course Code EBC4084) The objective of this course is to understand the role of ICT on business performance and on sectoral and aggregate economic performance. It includes modeling techniques, measurement issues and methodological approaches to analyse the impact of ICT on business and economics. It also includes data analysis and research methodologies. Moreover, as we will show, innovation at more levels, e.g. organizational innovations and organizational change is needed for ICT investments to be successful. Part of the course is to analyse and report on a real life example based on either firm level data (case study) or at a sectoral or more aggregate data. Introduction to web programming with PHP PHP, officially called: "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. It is somewhat similar to Javascript but the main difference is that Javascript is executed at the client side whereas PHP is executed at the server side. In the mid 1990’s many Web developers found that existing tools and languages were not ideal for the specific task of embedding code in markup. Those developers joined to develop a server-side scripting language which they felt would be ideal for developing dynamic Web-based sites and applications. Most of PHP's syntax is borrowed from C, although there are elements borrowed from Perl, C++ and Java as well. Perhaps the strongest and most significant feature in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple. Although PHP supports many databases, we will concentrate on MySQL. This course gives an introduction in programming with PHP in combination with some simple MySQL queries in order to be able to understand the working of dynamic websites. In the first week we will discuss the features of PHP whereas in the second week students have to build one or more applications on a web-server. These applications will be used for examination. This course is primarily on programming and working with databases and not on HTML or on Web-design. Some basic principles of HTML will be discussed, however.
I have been coordinator of the Infonomics programme (both Bachelors and Masters)
Presentation At March 21 2013 I gave a Presentation on the impact of ICT and the Internet on economic growth and the distribution of income for Scope-economics, a study association within the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics.
LifeView software To graphically present data as time series or scatter plots in an Internet browser, I created some software called LifeView. The software presented here can be used only from a local computer using local data (actually located in the same directory as the software). This (simple) software includes 8 files grouped together in the zip file and can be used for free for non-commercial use only. Please read the included readme.txt carefully.
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