Economics

In many situations, economic actors need to make decisions while knowing that the final outcome also depends on the decisions of others. Such situations are called games, and the actors involved are called players. In order to reach a good decision, it is important for a player to reason about the decisions and motivations of their opponents. This course teaches how to reason about your opponents in game theoretic situations, and how to use this reasoning to make good decisions. The theory is applied to various economic situations of interest.

This course is about money and Central Banking: what money is; how it is created; how it moves around and what impact it may have on the economy. Students are introduced to the basics of money creation, the role of Central Banks, the theory of inflation and monetary policy. The following topics are analyzed: the impact of digital technologies on the forms and nature of money; the recent actions of major Central Banks to address the consequences of the Covid crisis and their long run implications; the relationships between money, the Governments, and the society in this new environment

This advanced course examines the political economy of East Asia. It treats East Asia as a political-economic space beyond the boundaries of individual countries, and pays equal attention to the past and the present. The course covers a wide range of topics, including the silk road, the tributary system, the circulation of money, the political economy of colonialism, migration and diaspora, the adoption of modern state system, the developmental state, regional production networks, East Asian regionalism, and the rise of China.

The course explores the international frontiers of international trade studies at the enterprise level, Topics include the development of international trade theory and empirical research from the perspective of enterprises; individual enterprises in a dynamic open economy; the motivations, mechanisms, and influences of internationalization choices (trade, investment, outsourcing, etc.) when pursuing their own development and maximizing profits.

This course examines the key role of economic activities as a driver of climate change and how economic tools can be used to investigate this problem and to design climate policies. In order to deal with the problem of climate change, students have to rethink some key economic concepts such as efficiency, externality, intertemporal decision making under uncertainty, and welfare aggregation, from a new and more applied perspective. Students also become familiar with key tools for climate change and long term energy policy making: integrated assessment models. The general mechanism of these tools are learned through applications like the role of innovation in the energy sector, game theory and the (in)stability of international climate agreements, and how the inclusion of uncertainty affects optimal policies and investment decisions. The course discusses topics including and introduction to the climate change challenge, integrated assessment models, making decisions about the environment (cost benefit and cost effective analysis), who is the social planner? (Inter-temporal and social aggregation issues), modeling technological change and climate mitigation technologies, valuation methods (valuing the market and non-market benefits of avoided climate change), environmental policy making, and international environmental agreements.

This course explores how economics influences labor markets in multiple ways, analyzing the basic model of the labor market, both demand and supply.  The course also explores how human capital and skills can influence wages and looks at actual problems occurring in the workplace and labor markets.