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Welcome Activity

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Table of Contents

PerVectumMagazine forEconometrics studentsat Maastricht University

Year 21, issue 1 of 4October 2015

Editor in ChiefKatherine FaulknerCo-editorsSharon JanischkaMarijke Lijzenga

SCOPE | VectumP.O. Box 6166200 MD Maastricht+31 (0)43 388 39 40NL34 INGB 0006 9295 73

Visiting AddressTongersestraat 43Room 1.014 6211 LM Maastricht

info@scope-vectum.nlwww.scope-vectum.nl

4 Welcome to the New Board

6 Word of the President

9 Active Members

11 Rick’s Exchange

14 Welcome Activity

15 Paintballing

16 Identification of Mixed Causal-Non

causal Models: How Fat Should We Go?

20 LEVT

22 Research Lecture

23 Merit’s Exchange

25 Scavenger Hunt

26 Pool Tournament

27 Puzzles

30 Members’ Weekend

32 GMA

34 Upcoming Events

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Dear members,

We are the new board of SCOPE | Vectum consisting of Martijn Schoenmaker as Presi-dent, Bram Vandermeulen as Vice-President, Katherine Faulkner as Secretary and Ilina Dimitrovska as Treasurer. Here is a bit more about ourselves.

My name is Martijn Schoenmaker and I am a 23 year old, Dutch master student in the track of Econometrics & Operations Research. I am originally from Eindhoven and I still play field hockey there. Field hockey is an important part of my life and I have coached and trained a lot of different teams, besides playing it a lot myself. Furthermore, I really like to ski, sail, play tennis and squash.

As president of SCOPE | Vectum, I aim at creating an optimal working environment for the whole board of SCOPE | Vectum. Furthermore I aim at improving the coopera-tion with the LOES, the university and the other SCOPE associations. Especially within SCOPE I feel there is room for improvement of the overall cooperation and integration within the associations. Furthermore, I look forward to organizing a successful business trip and ski trip, together with my committees. Last but definitely not least, I think it is very important that we attract a wide diversity of Econometricians to Vectum. I see this as one of the main goals for me as a president. If you ever want to contact me directly feel free to call me at +31 (0)6 5273 1246.

My name is Bram Vandermeulen and I am a 22 year old Econometrics & Operations Research student, currently in the finishing phase of my bachelor. I’m originally from Kerkrade - a town on the Dutch-German border. Growing up, traveling always played an important role in my life and can still be considered my biggest passion - next to foreign languages.

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As vice-president of SCOPE | Vectum I am first of all looking forward to a great board year together with my fellow boardies Ilina, Katherine and Martijn. My main responsi-bility is to maintain and establish contracts with our valued sponsors. In this respect I aim to broaden the international scope of SCOPE | Vectum by making our study pro-gram more known in surrounding countries and establishing partnerships in these countries. In my opinion, both students and companies would benefit from this. Fur-thermore, I am looking forward to organizing a successful case day together with my committee. If you would like to contact me, my number is +31 (0)6 5492 0741.

My name is Katherine and I am a British second year Econometrics and Operations Research student and I am 20 years old. In the past I have been very into Trampolining, playing the drums and recorder. I also enjoy other activities like playing the ukulele, going on ski trips with friends and I have recently taken up squash.

As secretary I’m aiming to maintain the high standards of the PerVectum and keep the members databases and the website up to date. I’m also aiming to collect enough photos throughout the year to create a ‘year book’ with all the memories of the year. On that note one of my biggest aims is to ensure everyone has a lot of fun this year and that everything runs smoothly. If you would like to contact me my number is +31 (0)6 3191 4674.

My name is Ilina Dimitrovska, I am 20 years old and I am from Macedonia. Currently I am in my second year of studying Econometrics and Operations Research here at Maas-tricht University. Besides being good with numbers, I love learning foreign languages and travelling. I’m also actively playing tennis and I really enjoy skiing.

As a Treasurer and Social Activities Coordinator of SCOPE Vectum, I will strive to main-tain a healthy and stable financial position, but also honour the traditional and en-thusiastically received social activities organized every Tuesday evening. I am looking forward to a challenging year, but also a year filled with personal growth and a lot of fun. My number is +31 (0)6 2746 2455 if you would like to contact me.

On behalf of the board, we would like to wish you great fun and success in the upcom-ing year.

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Dear Econometricians,

After a long summer full of travelling, working, fun and relaxing the academic year has started for all of us. Right now all of you have already gone through the first period of this academic year and have hopefully passed all your exams. Never-theless, I would like to seize this oppor-tunity to welcome all of you (back) and to proudly present the first edition of the Pervectum of this academic year.

Our first years have just arrived in Maas-tricht and for many of them it’s probably their first experience at a university. Especially in the beginning, your studies in Economet-rics and Operations Research can be really overwhelming. Make sure you realise that this was the case for many of us including our members who made it to the sec-ond year and up. Remember that SCOPE | Vectum, and especially us as a board, will be there to help you whenever you need it. You can use our Extra Tutorials, but if you need any other form of help, feel free to contact anyone of us, and we will do whatever lies in our power to help you cope with the challenges you face during your first year. Our second years are probably very happy they survived the first year and are currently facing the choice to which universities they should apply for their study abroad. Do take note that there are special universities aimed at Econometrics and Operations Research students. On the other hand also realise that there are many different things you can get from your study abroad. Our third years are currently enjoying their study abroad and they are hopefully not only

enjoying their academic experiences. You can choose so many areas to develop yourself in; whether it’s sports, nature or culture is up to yourself, but make sure you experience as much as you can! Your time abroad will be over before you even notice! Most of our master students prob-ably know everything about this. They have just started their master’s and are coming close to the end of their studies. During this year there will be important decisions waiting, which will have a major influence on the rest of your life. SCOPE | Vectum can help you in this with our pro-fessional events like the business trip and the case day. Also our alumni might be of great help, so if you feel you need help, feel free to contact us.

In June of the last academic year the year-ly board change took place. I would like to seize this opportunity to thank and con-gratulate Joost, Coen, Evy and Frederique

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with their great work last year. Thanks to their commitment and hard work, SCOPE | Vectum has had another very successful year. We as a new board will try to build on this again. During our GMA Bram, Ilina, Katherine and I were installed as the new board of SCOPE | Vectum for the academ-ic year of 2015 – 2016. Katherine is our secretary and she’s responsible for the Pervectum and the website. She is helped in this by her PR-committee. Ilina is our treasurer and activities coordinator. She will keep track of our finances and togeth-er with Laura and the rest of her commit-tee she will organize our Tuesday night activities. Bram is our vice president and he is responsible, together with his com-mittees, for our external relations. He will also organize our yearly case day with the help of his committee. Finally, my respon-sibility as a president is to maintain the overall good condition of SCOPE | Vectum and together with my two committees I will also organize the Business Trip and our new Ski Trip.As I already mentioned before we have a new Ski Trip Committee. This committee will organize a Ski Trip for our members and alumni, during the resit week of block 2 (2nd until the 10th of April)! We hope that many people will join us and look forward to a great trip. Furthermore, we are currently in the process of forming an alumni committee. We feel that our alum-ni are very important to the association. To enhance the contact with them we felt it was necessary to create a special com-mittee for this, which will mainly consist of alumni. This committee will organise activities for alumni and will aim to extend the contacts between our alumni and our current members.

During the first block we have had many different activities which were organised by Ilina, with the help of her committee and especially Laura. Our first activity was, like last year, of a more interactive form than in previous years. There were many different games, in which our (new) mem-bers got to know each other. Furthermore, there were burgers for everyone. Unfor-tunately, most of you weren’t as hungry as we expected, and we have been eating burgers ever since. Our second activity was for the adventurous members: paint-balling. Here we got the opportunity to improve our positions within the labour market by shooting fellow econome-tricians. Although an unnamed board member got shot many times, everyone survived this exciting activity. In week three the national econometricians’ soccer tournament, the LEVT, took place. It was remarkable to see how many of our stu-dents took part in the LEVT again. Unfor-tunately, it was also remarkable how many goals were scored against us! Despite our losses we received our well-deserved prize and we had a great BBQ followed by a beer pong tournament. It became evident here, that we should send more people to the US on their studies abroad as many people were not as well-trained in beer pong as we had hoped. In week four we had our research lecture by possi-bly the most well-known professor of our program: Mr. Storcken. He gave us a more game theory insight into how to divide cakes. After his lecture we went to the Ma van Sloun to divide beers. Unfortunately, Mr. Stocken was not able to join us be-cause his sleep was more value adding in terms of utility. In the fifth week we had

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a Scavenger Hunt. During this hunt all participants had to perform different chal-lenges. These challenges showed sides of people that had always been hidden (and it might have been better in some cases that they still were). The last activity of this block was Pool. Some people clear-ly needed some more practice, as even some balls ended up on the floor. How-ever, I do regret leaving my partner to the mercy of Katherine and Laura.

After all activities it has always been a tradition to go to the Preuverij, mostly called ‘the Preuv’. During block 1 this had been (temporarily) changed to the Ma van Sloun. We, as the whole of SCOPE, felt that the Preuverij was not living up to our expectations. That’s why we decided to temporarily try another bar close to the SBE. After our first block there was an official evaluation and it has been decided that we will now stay at the Ma van Sloun for the foreseeable future.

This is the first of four successful PerVec-tums that we hope to publish this year. There are a variety of articles that we hope you enjoy reading, from Rick and Merit’s experiences abroad to reflections on the activities of the last block as well as the members weekend and the GMA. There is also an article written by Sean Telg , president of SCOPE | Vectum three years ago, and his supervisors Alain Hecq and Lenard Lieb.

Finally, I would like to wish all of you the best of luck during the upcoming year and hope you will enjoy your year in Maastricht (or still abroad for our third years)! If you have any questions about SCOPE | Vectum, or any other questions

that you feel we could help you with, feel free to contact me or any of my board members. I hope you will enjoy this issue of the Pervectum and I hope to see many of you at our activities during the rest of the year!

Martijn Schoenmaker,President of SCOPE | Vectum 2015 – 2016

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PR Committee

Hey we are the PR Committee; Katherine Faulkner, Marijke Lijzenga and Sharon Janischka. We all joined the PR Committee because it seemed a lot of fun and a very engaging experience. Our job is to take care of the PerVectum and to take and spread the pictures after every event. We hope to uphold the high stand-ards of PerVectum but still give our personal touch to it. In our eyes the PerVectum should be attractive for people to read and this is something we hope to

achieve by writing stories that are interesting and relevant for our readers. Of course, we would like to cheer the PerVectum up by including pictures that we take on events and we hope to capture many memorable moments.

Activities Committee

The activities committee organises activities for the members of SCOPE | Vectum every Tuesday night. The ac-tivities vary from research lectures, to paintball, Oktoberfest, ice skating and many more. This committee strives to make every Tuesday night a mem-orable one. We want to encourage bonding between the different years and create a pleasant vibe, so that everyone feels at home at Vectum. This committee is led by Laura van Vledder.The people organising all the activities are (from left to right on the photo): Joost Veth, Laura van Vledder (head of the committee), Ilina Dimitrovska, Eric Schulze-Berge, Marie Ternes and Noah Stegehuis.

Ski trip committee

Hey we, Eric Schulze-Berge, Roderik Turksema and Mar-tijn Schoenmaker are the new Ski Trip committee! We are responsible for organising the Ski Trip in the resit week of block 2. This is proving challenging to organise but we hope to organise an amazing trip. We hope that many of you will join us and that we will have lots of fun both on the slopes and afterwards.

Active Members

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Business trip committee

The business trip committee is in charge of organis-ing SCOPE | Vectum’s yearly business trip which will take place in January. During this five day trip we will visit several companies in the area of Amster-dam. As a committee, we make sure that everything, from the stay in Amsterdam to the company visits, runs smoothly. The members of the committee are Bas van de Werff, Silas Daalhuizen, Marijke Lijzenga and Martijn Schoenmaker. We hope to make it an interesting and memorable business trip!

External Affairs Committee

The External Affairs Committee is the most serious committee of SCOPE | Vectum and is in fact our financial engine, as it is in charge of establishing and maintaining contacts with companies. The highlight of the year is the Case Day - an event where companies provide you with interesting and challenging cases that are to be solved. Ideally, we strive to put SCOPE | Vectum in a more international position, e.g. by contracting com-panies across the border. This committee is led by Bram Vandermeulen. The members for the academic year 2015-2016 are Carien Leushuis (2nd year E&OR), Zohaad Fazal (1st year E&OR), Emmanuel Djanga (2nd year E&OR) and Edwin van der Vegt (2nd year E&OR).

German External Affairs Committee

We endeavour to see SCOPE | Vectum being more valued across the border. The other associations under the SCOPE framework already show that a lot of companies abroad have a keen interest in us - Maastricht students, especially when considering Germa-ny and Luxembourg. The main task for this committee is to make companies outside the Netherlands feel comfortable with Maastricht University, the way Econometrics & Operations Research is set up and, obviously, our association. We try to achieve that by approaching them in their own language, i.e. German. This committee is led by Bram Vandermeulen. The members for the academic year 2015-2016 are Edwin van der Vegt (2nd year E&OR), Christian Wirths (2nd year E&OR) and Dominik Dribusch (2nd year E&OR).

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Hello Maastricht!My name is Rick and currently I am

spending my exchange semester at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.Why Canada and Vancouver? Well, I wanted to spend my exchange in an English speak-ing country, as I wanted to improve my English and did not really feel like learning another language on such short notice. So my options were Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. For the US I felt I was too young (I’m still 20) to do anything, and Australia and New Zealand did not have many campuses. Since the 2010 Winter Olympics I have become quite interested in Vancouver, and our partner university there happened to have quite a decent busi-ness / economics department and a big campus with a fair chance of getting housing on it. So Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, became my first choice, and I was very pleased to hear in November that I got this place!

The application process went pretty smoothly and in the end of August I took a plane to Vancouver. My initial plan was to travel with my family through California and then go to Vancouver, but due to personal circumstanc-es we had to cancel that trip. Luckily my father could still join me and together we travelled to the mountain village Whistler and the capital of British-Columbia, Vic-toria, and discovered downtown Vancouver. Whistler is a small, touristic village where lots of the mountain dis-ciplines of the 2010 Winter Olympics took place. There was no snow yet, but it is also an amazing place to go hiking and to recover from the jetlag. After an amazing time with my dad it was time to move into my new resi-dence and the orientation week of the university.

Rick’s Exchange

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The campus of SFU is located on a mountain, approximately 45 minutes by bus from the city center of Vancouver. Most buildings are not that pretty and look like World War II bunkers or prisons, but the surroundings are beautiful. You can see the city, snow-covered mountains, and the ocean. And it is surrounded by nature, which means there is a lot of wildlife! There are plenty of raccoons, deer and even bears. Unfortunately,

I didn’t see a bear yet, but I hope this will happen someday. On campus there are all the facilities that you need as a student: a pub, a Pizza Hut, two Starbucks and Subways, a supermarket, plenty of sporting facilities and all the student houses. My home is a so-called Townhouse, a house with a kitchen, two bathrooms, a living room, and 4 sepa-rate bedrooms. I was glad to find that I have nice housemates. During the introduction week we did all sorts of fun activities and I got to know many nice exchange students, but in terms of partying and drinking it did not get even close to the INKOM.Even though school started after that week, my last few weeks felt more like a vacation. There is so much to do and to see here. If you are into outdoor activities, then Vancouver is a great place. You can rent a car and drive to the most amazing lakes, forests and mountains. Thus far I did a lot of hiking and exploring Vancouver’s surroundings, but also plenty of other nice activities worth mentioning. For example visiting an ice hockey match of the Vancou-ver Canucks against the Calgary Flames, or attending the Vancouver International Film Festival, which were both great experiences. In the Thanksgiving weekend I travelled to the Canadian Rocky Mountains and visited six national parks and the mountain villages Banff and Jasper. We did so much fun stuff: walking on a glacier, canoeing on Emerald Lake, spotting wildlife, melting marshmallows at a campfire, swimming in hot springs, and visiting very pretty lakes, waterfalls and mountains. I think that was the highlight of my exchange so far.

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Furthermore I’m planning to go to Seat-tle, which is basically around the corner in North-American terms of distances. Hopefully I will also be able to ski in November and December, because the surrounding mountains are supposed to be amazing places for winter sports. And Halloween is coming up next week, so I’m also looking forward to experi-ence that here in Canada, it is quite a big thing. I still need to find a costume though.

I also got to represent The Netherlands and Maastricht University at the Study Abroad Fair here at SFU. That is a fair organized by current exchange students to tell Canadian students who are going on exchange about their home universities, so then they can make a nice choice. Maastricht University was may more popular than I expected it to be, especially among all these other nice destinations. But I have to say Maas-tricht did a really good job sending lots of information packages and even stroopwa-fels!For all the first-years I would say: study hard and get good grades, so you will increase your chances of getting a spot at your dream university or destination. Sec-ond-years: enjoy the process of making your final choices and choose Canada: the exchange rate is great! (just kidding, you will have a great time no matter where you choose to go) and I hope that my fellow third-year students are also having a great time!

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Welcome Activity

During the welcome activity the new Vectum members were officially introduced to Vectum and its members. It was a great opportunity to meet people and hear stories about Econometrics and Operations Research. We played several games where we got to know each other's secrets and saw everybody make weird movements to complete tasks. Of course there was enough food for everyone during the bbq and enough beer afterwards in the Preuverij.

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Paintballing

On Tuesday 8th September we went paintballing at Fun Valley Maastricht. We were split up in two groups and had to play three games. We started with a general game. In the second game one group had to raise the flags while the other group was defending them. During the last game it was already dark, which made it more challenging. We were all really active in the games and had a great night with a lot of fun! Afterwards we went to the Preuverij for a drink.

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Identification of Mixed Causal-Noncausal Models: How Fat Should We Go?

by Sean Telg, Alain Hecq and Lenard Lieb

IntroductionSeveral time series textbooks advocate the use of noncausal (or similarly, forward-looking) models. The reason for this is that these models offer the possibility to rewrite a process with explosive roots into a process in reverse time with roots outside the unit circle. Also in the applied econometric literature there is a growing interest in noncausal models. We see at least three reasons explaining this interest. First, several authors (see e.g., Lanne, Luoto and Saikkonen, 2012) have shown that noncausal models might improve forecast perfor-mances obtained with purely causal autoregressive models. Second, noncausal models are, together with non-invertible models, special cases where shocks are non-fundamental (see Alessi, Barigozzi and Capasso, 2011). This issue is crucial in macroeconometrics and is interpreted as the evidence that the econometrician has a smaller information set at his disposal than the economic agents have. Third, and this is our main focus, forward-looking autoregressive models with non-Gaussian fat tails disturbances are able to replicate fea-tures (e.g. bubbles) that previously could only be obtained by highly nonlinear and com-plex models.

GoalWe want to guide the practitioner on the following issues:

(i) We show that the fatter the tails of the distribution are, the faster the convergence of the estimator is achieved (and the more accurate the identification of the model is). (ii) We compare the performance of a Student’s-t Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach with an alternative Least Absolute Deviation (LAD) estimator that we propose in this paper. (iii) We investigate how fast the causal and noncausal parameters (by MLE or LAD estima-tor) approximate their asymptotic normal distribution; (iv) As a first illustration, we provide the details of the necessary steps to implement those tools for the demand of solar panels in Belgium. While that application might be affected by the small sample that is used (about 75 observations), we provide a second application where we look at mixed causal-noncausal models on daily realized volatilities for 21 equity indexes measured over 2000-2014 and hence on more than 3000 observations;

The Mixed Causal-Noncausal ModelThe univariate mixed causal-noncausal model, denoted MAR(r,s) is usually written as

(1- ϕ ₁L-…- ϕ rLr )(1-φ1 L-1-φs L-s ) yt= εt, (1)

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or in more compact notationϕ(L)φ(L-1 ) yt= εt,

with L the backshift operator, i.e., Lyt=yt-1 gives lags and L-1yt=yt+1 produces leads. When φ1= ... = φs=0, the process yt is a purely causal AR(r,0) process, that is, the standard back-ward-looking AR process that is often employed in the literature. That is, yt is only regressed on its past values. When ϕ1=⋯= ϕr=0, we obtain a purely noncausal regression, that is, yt is only regressed on its own future values. The roots of both polynomials are assumed to lie outside the unit circle (to ensure stationarity) and the error term εt is assumed to be iid non-Gaussian. Since the Gaussian distribution fully depends on second-order moments and the autocovariance function is symmetric, it is unable to discriminate between causal, non-causal and mixed causal-noncausal processes (i.e., the process becomes time-reversible with Gaussian errors).Following Gouriéroux and Jasiak (2015), we define the unobserved causal and noncausal components of the process yt as follows:

ut ≡ ϕ(L) yt ↔ φ(L-1 ) ut= εt,

and

vt ≡φ(L-1) yt ↔ ϕ(L) vt= εt.

The specification of these filtered values is very useful in simulating, estimating and forecast-ing mixed causal-noncausal processes. In the next part, we discuss two methods for estimat-ing these type of models. The first one is the MLE approach that is usually employed in the literature, while the second one is the LAD that we propose in our paper.

EstimationThe Student’s-t maximum likelihood estimation is based on maximizing with respect to the parameters of interest, the following (approximate) log-likelihood function, conditional on the observed data (y1,…,yT ),

where Γ(∙) denotes the Gamma function, σ the scale parameter, ν the degrees of freedom and α a potential intercept added in equation (1). We find, based on the unobserved causal and noncausal components discussed above, that the following asymptotic results can be derived:

where Υφ=E[vt2 (φ)] and Υϕ=E[ut

2 (ϕ)] are the variance-covariance matrices of the unob-served noncausal and causal components respectively.

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For the least absolute deviation, which assumes that the underlying noise εt is mean zero Laplacian, we find similar results. This method accounts for maximizing the following condi-tional (approximate) log-likelihood:

which is (given T) maximized if the criterion is minimized. Again, based on the formulation of the unobserved causal and noncausal components:

where fε (∙) is the probability of the error term which is continuous in a neighbourhood of zero.

Simulation Results

The two graphs below show density plots of the estimator’s sampling distribution (black solid LAD, black dashed MLE) and their asymptotic limit based on T=200 observation. The process considered is a MAR(1,1) with ϕ=0.3 and φ=0.7 with εt following a t-distribution with both 10 and 3 degrees of freedom. The red curve depicts the standard normal distri-bution. For a Student’s-t distribution with 10 degrees of freedom, we find that the approxi-mation is pretty poor for both the MLE and LAD estimator. This follows from the fact that for high degrees of freedom, the t-distribution tends towards a Gaussian distribution.

Especially this distribution, makes causal and noncausal processes indistinguishable and thus provide inaccurate estimates.

If we consider a t-distribution with only 3 degrees of freedom, we see that the estimation becomes more accurate for both the MLE and LAD estimation. In fact, the lower the degrees of freedom we consider, the better the more accurate estimation is. Especially the LAD esti-mator benefits from very assymetric and leptokurtic error distributions, as we find that the standard errors of the parameters diminish a lot. So to give an answer to the question asked in the title of the paper: the fatter tailed the distribution, the better the identification.

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Final remarksIn our paper, we look more closely at these results and also investigate them in two empir-ical applications (on solar panel bubbles and realized volatilities based on high-frequency intra-daily returns). As the literature on noncausal models is pretty novel, we also present a guide for practitioners to deal with these models (identification and estimation) in practice. If you want to know more about mixed causal-noncausal models, the following references can definitely help you.

ReferencesAlessi, L., Barigozzi, M. and M. Capasso (2011), Non-Fundamentalness in Structural Econo-metric Models: A Review, International Statistical Review, 79, 1.

Gouriéroux, C., and J.M. Zakoïan (2013), Explosive Bubble Modeling by Noncausal Process, CREST Discussion Papers 2013-04.Gouriéroux, C. and J. Jasiak (2015), Filtering and Prediction in Noncausal Processes. CREST Working Paper.

Lanne, M., Luoto J. and P. Saikkonen (2012), Optimal Forecasting of Noncausal Autoregressive Time Series, International Journal of Forecasting, 28, 623-631.

Lanne, M. and P. Saikkonen (2011), Noncausal Autoregressions for Economic Time Series, Journal of Time Series Econometrics, vol.3, iss.3.

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We, as first years girls (team name: Maastricht girlsies), signed up for the women’s competition as we thought this would be the least competitive –softies–pool (we

missed out on the recreational option). Little did we know, we would be playing against fierce girls. Without any practice we ended up playing against–and especially losing from– girls teams that had actually been training. We did make one goal, which we were very ex-cited about–probably more than we should have been. The girls we played against were confused about our sudden happiness, as they had made three goals in the same game.All in all we had a fun day, even though we finished last. In the end we could really laugh about our football “skills”, and I preferred the time spent together besides being physically active better anyway. The BBQ was really good there was more than enough food and there were plenty of dishes and meats to choose from. For the people that still had enough energy left (not me) there was a beer pong tournament afterwards.

Article by Noah Stegehuis.

LEVTLandelijk Econometristen VoetbalToernooi(National Econometricians Football Tournament)

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Research Lecture

On Tuesday the 22nd of September, Ton Storcken gave an interesting lecture about the division of goods and pareto optimalisa-tion. He explained this by a very intriguing example; a cake! Besides that we also learned how his grandmother divided a bowl of fuit and a bowl of soup. Afterwards we all went to the Ma van Sloun for the first time for a post discussion and a beer.

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When I got allocated to Monash in Melbourne at the end of November last year, I couldn’t wait to go and explore

the land down under. Both Dominique and I carried on the tradition of econometricians going to Monash for at least the third year in a row. I can’t really tell what made me want to go to Australia; probably a mix of good weather, an Eng-lish speaking country, awesome beaches, beautiful nature, nice semester times and my gut feeling.

I was travelling to Melbourne together with Dominique, on our way we stopped in Singapore for four days. We explored the city where some of our fellow econometricians would spend their semester abroad. We did some sightseeing and enjoyed some heat and humidity before we flew to Melbourne. Cold and heavy rain showers welcomed us. Yes, winter does exist in Australia, especially in the south. It turned out to be the coldest winter in 30 years, but the thought of spring coming soon was stuck in everyone’s head (winter is a lot sunnier here, too).

The first two weeks were O-weeks (orientation weeks). I made new friends every day. Uni had organized heaps of activities and events, including two trips to Healesville Sanctuary and Phillips Island. We got to see our first kangaroos, wombats and little pen-guins coming to the shore after sunset. Unfortunately, it started raining heavily while we were waiting for the penguins to arrive and we were drenched.The Monday after the orientation weeks, both uni and Frisbee started. (For those who don’t know me, Ultimate Frisbee is quite a big part of my life.) Eventually, I decided to try out for unigames and I made the team! We just came back from Gold Coast yes-terday and we all had an amazing week. About 8000 students from 42 unis all over Australia were competing in 32 different sports. A week full of sports, sun, beach times, having fun and partying. I probably need another few days to recover, even though the tenth of twelve teaching weeks is just about to start.Speaking of uni and courses, half the semester has mostly been revision and absolutely no need to worry about. One or the other assignment re-quired some work but apart from that, it is a relaxed uni life compared to Maastricht. We even have a week off after week 12 to study for exams.

Merit’s Exchange

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PerVectum

On most of the weekends I’ve been to the city, there’s always something to do. Whether it’s an AFL (Australian Football League) game, winter fireworks, the European Night Market, some other cultural event or just a stroll through the city. Melbourne never becomes boring and there are lots of free things to explore.A few weeks ago I went to Sydney for a weekend, my sister happens to be there for one exchange semes-ter at the same time. There has always been a rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney (I

tell you, Melbourne is better, but go and judge yourself ). We went sightseeing, spent some time at the beach and went hiking in the Blue Mountains. To be fair, Sydney’s beaches are the best! She will come visit me in a week, we are planning to go on a road trip to the Great Ocean Road, a beautiful coastal street between Melbourne and Adelaide. One of Australia’s benefits is its nature. It has a lot of

wildlife that you can’t find anywhere else in the world, such as wallabies, koalas or wombats. Just last weekend Maartje and Jeroen, two fellow econometricians, came over from Sydney on their way to Perth and spent a weekend in Melbourne with Dominique and myself. We went on a one-day road trip to Wilsons Prom-ontory, or The Prom. It’s located at the southern-most tip of mainland Australia and offers breath-taking scenery. At the beginning of the park we saw our first wild emus and kangaroos, there were heaps of yellow road signs that warned us against animals on or next to the road. My two favorite things were the magnificent view from Mount Oberon and Squeaky Beach which had the finest sand I’ve ever seen. The trip finished with some wild wombats and a perfect sunset. I could not turn my eyes off the red and purple sky while we were driving back home.My summer break will start end of November and I’m planning to go hiking in New Zealand with my sister. Afterwards, I will travel down the East Coast and be in Sydney for New Year’s Eve.I can’t believe that more than half of my time in Oz is already over, but I am really look-ing forward to everything that will come and to see all of you again in January!

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The best way to discover the city and still have fun: do a scavenger hunt. In three groups the Vectum members roamed through the city and competed tasks for points. Taking a religious photograph in front of the church at the vrijthof and proposing to a random stranger (and of course hoping he or she said yes for extra points) are just a few examples of the tasks that we undertook. Afterwards we obviously had to do a post-discussion with a few beers at the Ma van Sloun.

Scavenger Hunt

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PerVectum

For our final activity of block 1 we had a pool tournament. First we went to the SBE to check out the photos and videos which were taken during the Scavenger Hunt as we were not able to do so the week before. After watching the funny photos and videos and announcing the winners, we went to the Snooker Center. Many people joined the activity and we played a competition in teams of two. Featuring pooling techniques that have never been seen before, we all had a fun night. We ended the evening with a great night at the Ma van Sloun!

Pool Tournamemt

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PuzzlesPuzzle 1

Your task is to place the numbers from 1 to 19 in the hexagons so that any straight line of three, four or five cells, in any of the three directions, add up to

the same magic constant,which I can reveal must be 38.

Puzzle 2

Crossing the riverThree jealous husbands with their wives must cross a river, and find a boat with no boatman. The boat can carry two of them at once. How can they all cross the river so that not a single wife is left in the company of another men without her own husband being present? Both men and women may row and all husbands are suspiciously jealous: They do not trust their unaccompa-nied wives to be with another man, even if the other man’s wife is also pres-ent.

Hint: Cancel all impossible passages and with a bit of logic, the minimum of passages should be 11.

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PerVectum

Solution to puzzle 1

Solutions to Puzzles

Solution to puzzle 2 - Crossing the riverA, B and C represent the husbands and a, b and c their wives.

This side In the boat Direction The other side A C a c B b → -A C a B ← b A B C a c → b A B C a ← b c A a B C → b c A a B b ← C c a b A B → C c a b c ← A B C b a c → A B C b B ← A C a c - B b → A C a c

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Members’ weekend; the weekend where one really gets to know their fellow econ-ometricians. This weekend is meant for the members of Vectum to have fun with

each other outside of the country, outside of our stomping grounds. The program and location of the weekend remained a secret until the very moment we were sup-posed to leave. The activities were diverse and kept us busy during the weekend.The first challenge was getting to the location, which was Camping & Hébergement Grand Bru in Durbuy, Belgium. All the drivers got directions from google maps that would lead us to the right location. Almost all drives were smart enough to ditch the directions and to fill the address into the GPS. However, one group did not think of getting their GPS out and decided the directions were going to be good enough. This group also happened to get lost at the very end of the trip and arrived a half hour later than the rest of the group.Once all the participants were at the campsite, everyone got settled in their rooms and Martijn lit the barbeque. Martijn decided to be the professional cook for the night and prepared all the meat. After dinner, most of the members started the drinking game “Never have I ever’. This was just to kill some time before the next activity would start, which was a dropping in the woods. There was a small problem though. The company thought that our booking was a mistake, because there happened to be another large group on the same campsite, that also booked the dropping, but for a day later. After Evy Zeptner called the company many times, they finally got to our campsite to drop us off. We had to split up into three groups. Each group got five minutes to look at a map, draw it, and get back to the campsite. The last group to leave were the first one back at the campsite. They had the route very clearly drawn (thank you Katherine), so they did not make a mistake walking back. The other two groups did not get to the campsite that quickly. The second group came back an hour after the first group, and the last group got back an hour after that. Once everyone was back, most people decided to call it a night.

Members’ WeekendBy Laura van Vledder

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PerVectum

The next morning, we all ate breakfast and the drivers got the directions for the next activity. The drive led us to Durbuy Adventure, where we would all go on a canoe trip. Duos were made, with one deathly duo in the mix: Jeroen and Martijn. Their mission: try to flip every canoe that they could. Some people escaped their terror, but most were unfortunate and ended up wet when they got back to shore. One couple, Bas and Tim, wanted to get the most out of this experience and were only halfway when everyone else had already dried up.After getting back to the campsite, everyone freshened up and got ready for the high-light of the weekend: the cantus. There was a tiny problem though. The stereo that we brought with us suddenly didn’t work anymore. Luckily, Roderik is very handy and could fix the speaker before the cantus started. During the cantus, Jeroen did not have mercy on anyone. Lapdances were given, beer was spilt all over the place, and songs were sung as loud as possible. The last bathroom break was installed by the Presus, and something bad happened. The electricity suddenly stopped working. There were likely too many devices plugged into sockets which made the group fall out. Coen and Martijn tried desperately to fix it. Marijke and Laura called their dad and boyfriend, be-cause they knew a little about electricity. Marijke’s father figured out what the problem was, but by the time the electricity was fixed, all the members started playing drinking games like beer pong. The board decided to not continue the cantus. Everyone enjoyed a few beers and some good drinking games. People enjoyed the night until the early morning. A few drivers went to bed when the cantus was ended by the electric prob-lem, so that they were fit in the morning to drive.The next morning, you could see immediately who stayed up until 5 o’clock in the morning and who called it a night earlier on. We all ate breakfast and finished the last of the eggs and bacon. The board plus some other members cleaned up the mess of last night, so that we could leave leaving the place in a decent state. A group photo was taken, the cars were packed, and it was time to leave Belgium and go back to Maas-tricht. Overall, the weekend was amazing filled with good memories to think back to.See you next year members!

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October 2015

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PerVectum

The annual GMA (General Members Assembly) for 2015 was a night to re-

member. First, the old board told of their individual achievements during the year, which were very impressive! First Joost gave us an overview of how Vectum did during the year. He then talked about how we had yet another successful business trip. The co-operation between SCOPE | Vectum and the other SCOPE associations, the other LOES associations and the KE department was also good. Next up was Coen. He told us about the companies that had sponsored us the last year allow-ing SCOPE | Vectum to do all the amazing events. Then Frederique told about the four popular PerVectums she published last year. In particular the 20th anniver-sary of SCOPE | Vectum edition. She also told how she had worked long and hard on the website to overcome its problems and help make it look as it does today. Last but certainly not least, Evy showed us a brief overview of the activities that we got up to last year. She then talked us through the financials where she showed we had even made a small profit. After-wards, we, as the new board, were inau-gurated and the GMA came to an end af-ter some lovely words from fellow SCOPE associations, the board of advice and the

GMA

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KE department. We then all went to the Preuverij to celebrate the fab-ulous year we had and the year to come. The celebrations were amaz-ingly fun and quite a few members celebrated through the twilight hours. As the new board we would like to thank the previous board for everything they did for SCOPE | Vectum and for us personally and we wish them luck in the future wherev-er they may end up.

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PerVectum

Week 1: OktoberfestA great way to kick off the upcoming period we will be celebrating the traditional Okto-

berfest on Tuesday 27th.

Week 2: Research LectureOn Monday 2nd November we will have a research lecture given by Nalan Bastürk.

Week 3: Casino RoyalOur new event for block 2. We will put our econometrics skills to good use by gambling

on Tuesday 10th November.

Week 4: WinterballA traditional event organised by SCOPE Maastricht. Time to get your evening wear on.

Week 5: Cycling dinner A popular event with dishes coming from around the world. Please join us in a three

course meal on Tuesday 24th November.

Week 6: IceskatingVectum’s traditional end activity for block 2. Join us on Tuesday 1st December for a

magical evening.

Dates may be subject to change.Please check www.scope-vectum.nl for the latest information and subscription forms.

Upcoming Events

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Thank you for taking the time to read the PerVectum.

We hope you enjoyed it!

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