Economics

This course examines the importance of health and human capital to individual well-being and economic growth. It evaluates how the natural, social, economic, and political environments affect the accumulation and stock of health and human capital and the ways in which health and human capital interact with one another. It documents the considerable inequality in health and human capital across society and considers ways in which policy may help reduce this inequality.

This course explores the theory and practice of market design. Economists study market mechanisms, and are also involved in the design of markets. Key examples include auctions to sell electricity, radio spectrum, or procurement contracts; mechanisms to sell internet advertising; online marketplaces; algorithms to match candidates to jobs, students to schools, or allocate courses to students; organ exchange systems. The field of market design studies how to choose the rules of mechanisms that solve such allocation problems, or how to organize successful marketplaces. It builds on the tools of game theory and mechanism design. This course explains the underlying theory in an intuitive way, and discusses actual designs. The goal is to understand why some market institutions succeed and other fail. The course is based on lectures to expose the theory, and class discussion of applications.

The course provides a deepened overview of macroeconomic theory. The content of the course mainly focuses on business cycle fluctuations, unemployment, inflation, the current account, and fiscal and monetary policy. The analysis is extended to include the fact that economic agents are forward-looking, which considerably deepens the insights into the determination and development of a country’s consumption, investment, current account, and economic policy. In addition, the course contains the IS–LM model that is important for analysis of economic policy.

This course provides an opportunity to rediscover one of the classic fields of anthropology, economic anthropology. It explores both classic and contemporary economic culture and allows for experimental use of economic anthropology in analysis of the student’s own empirical data, planned fieldwork, or theoretical discussions. The course explores issues such as forms of value, work, consumption, distribution and welfare society, spheres of exchange, spirits of capitalism, financialization, precarization, market fantasies, and economic cosmologies. The course consists of lectures, group discussions, presentations, and feedback sessions where students read and comment on each other’s writing.

Securities investment analysis refers to the process in which individuals comprehensively analyze various types of information affecting the value or price of securities through specialized analytical methods to determine their value, price, and movements. This course, while covering the foundational knowledge of securities investment analysis, primarily explores analytical methods from three perspectives: fundamental value analysis, technical analysis, and behavioral analysis in securities investment.

This course provides students with a general understanding of the different functions performed by financial markets and institutions and their role in the economic system. The course begins with a brief overview of the functions of the financial system and its connections to the real economy. The course then studies the functioning of financial markets and the main financial instruments. Finally, the course studies the economics of different types of financial institutions. The first part of the course analyzes in detail the characteristics of the major financial assets, and describes the institutional characteristics of the markets in which these assets are traded. The second part of the course studies in detail the objectives as well as the organization of the major financial intermediaries (commercial banks, investment banks, mutual funds) that allow to match demand and supply of funds when securities markets do not function perfectly. The course recommends students have background knowledge in Mathematics (applied), Management, Accounting, and Financial Statement Analysis as a prerequisite.

This course explores Chinese economic reforms and development, and introduces many of the elements of China's emergence and its potential role in the world economy. It uses China as a case study placing Chinese economic development in a historical and comparative context, exploring the contradiction between the unprecedented economic growth of the past century and the persistence of poverty in wealthy countries. The course begins with theories of economic growth and poverty, and studies economic and social institutions and public policy debates on ways to achieve rising incomes while improving living standards and promoting equality. The first part is on economic development and the most commonly used models of development. The second part covers contracts and development. 

Chinese-taught version of ECONOMICS OF DEVELOPMENT IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION. Slightly different title used at the host, but same course.