Ralf Becker

Additional Information

Current teaching:

Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics for Economists, Econometrics and Time-Series Econometrics.

After my undergraduate degree in Economics from the Johannis Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany) I studied for my PhD degree at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia, Supervisor: Prof Stan Hurn. After completing my PhD in 2003 I worked as a Lecturer at QUT before starting as a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Manchester in January 2005. I am passionate about teaching economics and in particular quantitative skills (mathematics, statistics and econometrics). I have a particular focus on helping students to develop relevant quantitative skills like programming in R or MATLAB.

In my time at Manchester I have worked in numerous professional service positions and am currently the Deputy Head of Department with responsibility for Teaching. I am an Executive Group Member of the Economics Network.

Ralf's Website: https://datasquad.github.io/ralffbecker/index.html

My general are of interest is econometrics and financial econometrics. In particular I am interested in the following areas:

* How to use high frequency information to forecast variance covariance matrices and how to use low frequency information in this process.

* Properties of wholesale electricity prices (in particular Australian prices) and the workings of the pre-dispatch system in the Australian Electricity Market

* Work in evaluating educational innovations (like flipped tutorials and lectures and peer assisted learning)