Economics

This course is designed for students wishing to clarify and advance their career goals through a 16-week internship in Thailand. It provides a structured learning environment to help students make the most of their internship experience. While there are no regularly scheduled class meetings, internships are conducted under the close academic supervision of the Social Policy & Development department at Thammasat University. An assigned internship coordinator provides oversight and guidance for the duration of the internship. The course requires a minimum of 128 total work hours. To facilitate the completion of the internship and maximize skill acquisition, students are required to work at least one full day per week at their internships. Graded Pass/No pass only.

The objective of this course is to understand the basic mechanism of business cycles and price developments (inflation) in Japanese economy particularly after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. The course also discusses structural changes in the economy affecting recent patterns of business cycles. The course also instructs on practical ways of obtaining Japanese economic data and how to use it effectively to make graphs or tables.  

The course analyzes how the labor market works, how agents in this special market behave, and how governments regulate and set up institutions to govern the labor market. Whether and how much to work, how much to invest in human capital (skills), unionization, and whether and where to migrate are all examples of decisions on the supply side of the labor market. The combination of labor (or different types of labor) and other factors in production, and job creation and job destruction are examples of decisions on the demand side of the labor market. Minimum wages, unemployment insurance, employment protection legislation, and collective bargaining, are examples of institutions governing the labor market. The course covers the following topics: labor supply and demand; labor market equilibrium; human capital, education, and training; compensating wage differentials; immigration; and automation and the future of work.

This course offers an intensive introduction into the field of economic psychology. After a review of basic principles of rational decision-making under uncertainty, the first part of the course gives an overview of psychological research related to judgment and decision-making. Examples include insights from psychology on how decision-makers assess probabilities and how they evaluate the outcomes resulting from their decisions. Actual patterns of judgment and decision-making are compared to basic principles of rational decision-making in order to detect systematic behavioral regularities and biases of real decision-makers. The second part of the course deals with examples of how psychological regularities influence economic decision-making in the field and the importance of these regularities for law and policy. Finally, the course gives an introduction to the field of neuroeconomics.

The course examines the issues of intercultural competence, cultural identity, and cultural diversity in European business context. Various case studies are considered from strategic, organizational, and marketing perspectives. The course enhances understanding of the high variety of European business cultures and explores the corresponding variety of management and marketing styles. Special attention is paid to the present burning economic issues of the European Union, business ethics, and the standards of corporate social responsibility as well as to the challenging aspects of managing diversity and multicultural team development. Ethnically diverse markets are viewed as rich opportunities which ethnic communities offer. Companies in different parts of Europe are subject to analysis, including their efforts to work successfully across borders. Students are involved in a process of self-reflection through learning about the different stages of cultural assimilation in a European business environment.