PhD students will be admitted to discuss their thesis upon completion of 180 ECTS (60 ECTS per year). At the beginning of each academic year, students must present a plan of courses and activities they will undertake. The study plan, which must be discussed with the faculty advisor and undersigned by her, will be presented to the faculty members and in case approved. The activities that the student can undertake and the relative ECTS are reported in Table A.
The 180 ECTS are subdivide according to the following criteria:

•  from 24 to 36 ECTS, courses whose completion is assessed by a formal exam;

•  from 6 to 14 ECTS, seminars and workshops whose completions is not assessed by a forma exam;

•  from 0 to 15 ECTS, teaching activities, such as seminars and thesis tutoring for master students, general tutoring and exams. In any case, the teaching activities cannot exceeds 40 hours per year;

•  from 115 to 150 ECTS, autonomous research activities aimed at the completion of the final dissertation. 

The eligibility of the courses and seminars undertaken by the student must be assessed by the faculty advisor, and they are broadly classified as follows:

• (a) courses offered in the Master studies offered by the University of Palermo;

• (b) courses organized by the PhD in Economics and Statistics and announced each year;

• (c) courses organized by the University of Palermo and aimed to PhD students to improve their competences in managing research projects, obtaining financial support from research institutions, copyright and licensing;

• (d) courses organized by national and international institutions, summer schools, conferences and workshops;

• (e) courses aimed at providing a foreign language (usually English) certification;

• (f) courses aimed at providing software usage certification (Matlab, R, Eviews, SAS, etc).

The conversion to ECTS of the courses is based on the number of hours and it is displayed in Table A.