Economics

This course introduces students to the economics of globalization. It explores reasons why classical economists thought comparative advantage (or differences between countries) was the basis for international trade, when in the past few decades the bulk of international trade has been between very similar countries. Students study the effects of the growing importance of international trade, with a focus on recent trade agreements and their projected consequences. During the second part of the course, students study the causes and effects of migration, and data and policy analysis is conducted to investigate the immigration regimes of some popular migrant destinations.

The course familiarizes students, quantitatively and qualitatively, with important issues in environmental economics and environmental policy making such as anthropogenic global warming, the sustainable use of resources such as fish and forests, and environmental pollution. The course gives you hands-on experience in how to model complex economic and environmental systems, helps you understand the basic natural processes affecting the environment, introduces you to you the main tools and challenges involved in environmental valuation, shows you ways to determine the efficient level of pollution, and discusses the instruments available to policy makers to reach such targets.

The International Internship course develops vital business skills employers are actively seeking in job candidates. This course is comprised of two parts: an internship, and a hybrid academic seminar. Students are placed in an internship within a sector related to their professional ambitions. The hybrid academic seminar, conducted both online and in-person, analyzes and evaluates the workplace culture and the daily working environment students experience. The course is divided into eight career readiness competency modules as set out by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which guide the course’s learning objectives. During the academic seminar, students reflect weekly on their internship experience within the context of their host culture by comparing and contrasting their experiences with their global internship placement with that of their home culture. Students reflect on their experiences in their internship, the role they have played in the evolution of their experience in their internship placement, and the experiences of their peers in their internship placements. Students develop a greater awareness of their strengths relative to the career readiness competencies, the subtleties and complexities of integrating into a cross-cultural work environment, and how to build and maintain a career search portfolio.

The objective of this course is to provide an introduction to modeling univariate and multivariate time series in economics. The topics covered include modeling non-stationary time series, Granger causality, co-integration, ARIMA, seasonality, ARCH, and Unit roots.

This course examines imperfectly competitive markets as well as the behavior of firms in these markets. The course looks at the effects of various business decisions and of various forms of policy intervention on the way firms compete and on the outcome of oligopolistic markets. Prominent recent antitrust cases are also discussed. Topics discussed include game theory, the determinants of market power in static oligopolistic models, strategic positioning and advertising, consumer inertia, collusive agreements, horizontal mergers, strategic and non-strategic barriers to entry, exclusionary practices, and anti-trust intervention. Prerequisites: familiarity with basic microeconomics concepts, in particular with the notion of Nash Equilibrium and Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium, with basic oligopolistic models (such as Bertrand and Cournot models of static competition) and with the fundamentals of unconstrained and constrained optimization problems.

This course introduces the general method and use of cost-benefit analysis with a particular emphasis on applications to resource and environmental economics. The course therefore deals with many crucial aspects of environmental cost-benefit analysis to provide the necessary background to assess the validity of practical environmental cost-benefit analyses, as well as to formulate how current guidelines can be improved based on the latest economic research. The course consists of a lecture block that provides an overview and introduces students to key concepts. Assessment is based on a presentation and written assignment on a topic of the student’s choosing.