Prelims work

Deadlines and submissions

Maths assignments: Mondays at midnight.
Economics assignments: Tuesdays at midnight.
Please submit all assignments to your personal OneDrive file
- Please scan written work to a pdf file, not jpg photos of work (there are apps that can do this). A lot of helpful advice is given here.
- One pdf document for the whole assignment (separate economics and maths)
- Name documents as “firstname_lastname_Econ_WeekX” or “firstname_lastname_Maths_WeekX” where X refers to the week of the tutorial you are submitting the assignment for.

Always show working/steps for problems. Briefly state what the quantity you’re computing is, or give a brief intuition of what’s going on.
3 things I look for in a good essay:
- Make sure to focus on answering the specific question being asked
- Demonstrate an understanding of models – in other words, don’t just state results, but explain or show how we get to those results, and what assumptions are needed. Often the easiest way to do this is through graphs/equations. Don’t go overboard, though: it’ll be context-specific how thorough you can be here, and don’t give very detailed derivations. A rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t spend more than half your essay on the model.
- A clear and nuanced discussion that considers different perspectives on the question. It can be helpful to begin your essays with 1-2 lines clearly summarising your argument.
There’s a good guid to writing essays in economics in section 3 of the exam guidance document on Canvas.

Sheet 1
Q3-14. Please do Q13 (simultaneous equations) by the “elimination method”.
Sheet 2
Questions 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9.
Sheet 3
Quick questions 1, 3, 6, 7.
Sheet 4 Q 1,2,3,5. Longer question 2

A few points on essay writing in economics:

The core of the essay should be to explain an economic model. In this case, the model is the story of comparative advantage you’ll be learning about in lectures. You have to go through this, even though it is not creative, the point is to show you’ve understood the core of the bookwork.
Having done that, try to critique the model. Thinking of ways in which free trade might be bad is good; linking them back to the model (if you can) is better. Obviously you can also take the counter line and say that free trade is in fact never bad: justify, preferably analytically.

Problems 1,6,7,8
(Maybe discuss some of the essay topics at the end of the Tutorial Sheet if there’s time)

Maths workbook sheet 7 longer question 3
Maths workbook sheet 9 quick question 1, 3
Tutorial sheet 5 Problem 6 NB: do not worry about the method of Lagrange multipliers. You will study that with Richard next year. Just approach these questions with methods 1 and 2.

workbook sheet 7 quick question 6 and longer question 1.
workbook sheet 8 question 1,6.
workbook sheet 9 longer questions 3 (do not use the method of Lagrange multipliers, method 1 should work fine)

Tutorial Sheet 6 Questions 2&3
Maths workbook sheet 6 longer question 1
Maths workbook sheet 8 question 5
Go over everything outstanding, and I’ll re-cover anything that was too fast – please email me with specific requests

Problems 1,4
Essay: since monopolies make super-normal profits, would it be a good idea to tax them?