2019 Open Source Economics Laboratory (OSE Lab) Boot Camp

July 1–August 9, 2019 | Saieh Hall for Economics, University of Chicago

The application period for 2019 is now closed.

The OSE Lab Boot Camp helps build advanced computational skills for economic research and policy analysis.

The Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce the third year of the Open Source Economics Laboratory (OSE Lab), which will run an intensive and immersive six-week computational economics Boot Camp from July 1 to August 9, 2019.

The goals of the Boot Camp are to:

Applications to the OSE Lab Boot Camp are encouraged from talented and motivated advanced undergraduate students and graduate students, with 25 fully funded student slots available for summer 2019. Funding includes travel to and from the University of Chicago, housing at the University, and a stipend of $4,000 for the six weeks. Successful applicants will have taken courses or demonstrate proficiency in core microeconomic theory (constrained optimization with Lagrangian multipliers), linear algebra, multivariable calculus, real analysis, and writing code in some programming language.

Program details

The curriculum of this program includes advanced mathematics, economic theory, machine learning, and computational methods, all with a focus on open source languages, collaboration, and exposition. Programming at the Boot Camp will be mostly in Python. We will also use the collaborative open source platforms of git and GitHub extensively. The previous two summers' curriculum materials are available in the BootCamp2018 and BootCamp2017 GitHub repositories.

The OSE Lab Boot Camp curriculum will draw from open source curriculum developed by the OSE Lab instructors as well as the resources of QuantEcon.org produced by Thomas Sargent and John Stachurski. We will also use an extensive set of applied mathematics open source training modules and computational labs from the Brigham Young University Applied and Computational Math Emphasis (ACME). Student researchers who complete the OSE Lab Boot Camp will emerge with a rich set of computational tools, experience in successfully applying those tools to macroeconomic questions, and the ability to collaborate effectively.

One of the most valuable modules in the OSE Lab Boot Camp will be two weeks of training in high performance computing and parallel programming using the University of Chicago's Midway supercomputing cluster. This training will be presented by Simon Scheidegger and translates well to projects on any large-scale cluster or cloud computing platform.

The director of the OSE Lab is Dr. Richard W. Evans, Associate Director and Senior Lecturer in the M.A. Program in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago and steering committee member of QuantEcon. This year's Boot Camp is Co-Organized by Richard Evans and Dr. Simon Scheidegger. Simon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at HEC Lausanne.

And finally, as a new addition to the OSE Lab Boot Camp curriculum, we are pleased to announce that this year's Boot Camp will be the first of the next three years of summer camps to include the Econometric Society's Dynamic Structural Economics Workshop during the second week of the OSE Lab Boot Camp, July 8-14. The Dynamic Structural Economics Workshop week is primarily organized by John Rust (Georgetown University), Bertel Schjerning (University of Copenhagen), and Fedor Iskhakov (Australia National University), Sanjog Misra (University of Chicago, Booth), and Gunter Hitsch (University of Chicago, Booth). All OSE Lab students will get to participate in the curriculum instruction during the first half of that week, which will include discrete choice dynamic programming, structural estimation, and dynamic games. Then the students will get to participate in the conference that will take place in the last part of the week.

Instructors for this summer's Boot Camp will include:

The application period for 2019 is now closed.

More information

To read comments from students who completed the OSE Lab Boot Camp in past years, click here.

To read a list of answers to frequently asked questions, click here.

If the FAQ section does not answer your questions, you can direct any questions to Richard Evans or Simon Scheidegger.