Stellenbosch team reaches finals of Econometric Games

Every year, 30 top universities around the world participate in the Econometric Games hosted by the University of Amsterdam’s study association for Actuarial Science, Econometrics & Operational Research (VSAE). The participating universities send delegations of four students who are presented with a technically challenging case study to solve in a limited time period. This year, Martin Mwale, Petro van Eck, Roan Minnie and Willem Wilken (pictured left to right) represented Stellenbosch University, the only African university at the event. They were supported by Gideon du Rand from the Department of Economics.

The team did extremely well by being selected into the top 10 and participating in a final round, effectively winning out over participating teams from a number of very highly acclaimed international universities (including Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford Universities). This is a first for Stellenbosch.

While the team prepared intensively beforehand, the specific case to be addressed always comes as a surprise, and teams have to work on very technically demanding problems under tight deadlines before presenting their results in a written report. The theme of this year's Games was “Climate Econometrics”. In the first round, stretching over two days, teams had to employ the global carbon budget and data from the Global Carbon Project to forecast the growth of global atmospheric carbon concentration until the year 2100. For the finals, teams were presented with an extension of the first case and expected to deliver a full report and a presentation later on the same day. This time, teams had to disaggregate the growth in global atmospheric carbon concentration and allow for anthropogenic emissions by different countries or groups of countries. The model also had to be extended to capture the relationship between emissions and an indicator of economic activity.