Long before he became the Executive Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Economics and Data Science (MAEDS) programme, Mike Lipsitz was simply curious about how markets shape decisions. Growing up in Easton, Connecticut, he developed an interest in mathematics and economics that led him to Haverford College and later Boston University, where he earned his PhD in Economics.
After graduate school, Lipsitz taught undergraduate and master’s students at Miami University in Ohio, a place known for strong teaching. He then moved to the Federal Trade Commission, where he put economics into practice to enforce antitrust laws.
Each stage of Lipsitz’s career emphasised this to him: employers need experts who can apply economics to real-world problems but the way the subject is currently taught does not adequately prepare students for careers in the modern workforce. Lipsitz wanted to bridge that gap. “I was excited to provide young economists with the tools to make immediate, meaningful contributions in economics and data science,” he shares.
The MAEDS programme is delivered by the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Economics, ranked among the top 10 in the US. Below are three takeaways from a degree dubbed “the Ivy League choice for an impactful quantitative economics education”:
MAEDS students master data visualisation techniques to communicate insights to technical and non-technical audiences. Source: The University of Pennsylvania
A seamless and structured path to data science mastery
MAEDS is designed with today’s workplace in mind. The programme integrates technical skills from the start through the “Computational Methods for Economists” course. “Students learn advanced coding skills in languages like R and Python — languages broadly used in the workforce,” says Lipsitz.
They also become familiar with GitHub, a tool used by developers to manage and share their code. “Exposing students to multiple languages and platforms better prepares them for the realities of the job market,” he adds. But technical skills are only part of the picture. Students learn how to manage projects, collaborate with others, and create workflows that can adapt over time as well.
This course lays the groundwork for the next: “Machine Learning for Economists.” Here, students will explore the cutting-edge techniques economists and data scientists are using to tackle complex business and policy challenges. These include natural language processing, deep learning, neural networks, and large language model (LLM) agents.
The course “will teach students the strengths and limitations of AI, and how it can be used to enhance problem-solving and create efficient workflows,” shares Lipsitz. “Students will also learn to use modern AI workflows, including how to design and deploy AI agents.”
The MAEDS programme is the Ivy League choice for an impactful quantitative economics education. Source: The University of Pennsylvania
Real-world problem solving
Every part of the programme is designed to help you solve complex economic and business challenges. In “Applied Microeconomics I,” for example, Lipsitz “uses a variety of theoretical and applied tools to describe the shape of markets and predict consumer and firm behaviour,” he says. In “Econometrics II,” the class explores a different question: how can we tell whether one thing actually causes another?
Lipsitz brings these questions to life with examples such as the World War II aircraft case. “Damage on surviving planes was concentrated around the wingtips and fuselage. However, this is survivorship bias: only surviving planes were studied. Counterintuitively, the right thing to do was to reinforce the areas with little or no damage,” he shares. “That is why in “Econometrics II, we will consider several econometric techniques that allow economists to reach correct causal conclusions by working around survivorship bias and other common data issues.”
Dirk Krueger is a Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches the “Applied Macroeconomics I” course, where students work with real data from sources such as the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), which consist of hundreds of thousands of economic data time series from scores of national, international, public, and private sources. Students also get to use databases on historical development data (a long time series on indicators of economic growth, for a wide set of countries) and the Penn World Tables (which provides purchasing power parity and national income accounts converted to international prices for 185 countries).
“Dynamic economic models and their applications, even simple ones, often require numerical techniques to be solved,” he says. “Although my course will emphasise intuition over heavy computational machinery, we will encounter dynamic consumption, investment and general equilibrium models whose solution, simulation, and application will require numerical approaches.”
Being able to analyse data is one thing. Being able to explain what it means is another. “While it is not difficult to explain what the average value in a dataset is, as the statistical concepts at play become increasingly complex, so too does communicating what those concepts mean for a non-technical audience,” explains Krueger. “By integrating economic theory and data science, and by emphasising how analysis of data does not just generate fancy statistics but solves practical problems, we seek to train students who are masters of understanding and explaining the intuitive economic story that the data tells.”
Access to a network of fantastic jobs
MAEDS students therefore graduate with a rare blend of economic insight and advanced data science expertise — and they do so while benefiting from everything else the University of Pennsylvania has to offer.
“It includes economics alumni from the university’s undergraduate and PhD programmes, many of whom now work at leading consulting firms, financial institutions, and other major organisations,” Lipsitz shares. “Additionally, the Wharton School is widely known as one of the best business schools in the world, with connections that penetrate many renowned financial and business institutions.”
And as students begin thinking about life after graduation, the university’s Career Services is there to help. Resources such as CareerExplorer allow master’s students to explore different career paths and understand where their skills can take them. Along the way, they receive personalised guidance on applications, interviews, and professional development, helping them approach their job search with confidence.
Explore the MAEDS curriculum and apply today to join the next generation of data-driven economists.
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