Economics

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the principles of health care organization and policy in a comparative perspective. The course analyzes the evolution and contemporary state of health care systems in different Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The course covers the following: the evolutionary path of OECD health care systems; main models of health care funding including the differences between tax based models, SHI-models, and models based on voluntary insurance; models of health care provision; health care reforms over the last decades; and health policy and politics.

This course provides a study of various economic theories dealing with issues related to international cooperation and development and their relationship to national growth. In particular, we recognize the need for international cooperation by examining the impact of agricultural development on the national economies of developing countries. Furthermore, by learning about the relationship between agriculture and issues such as inequality and poverty, population and health, the course provides fundamental knowledge on a variety of international issues such as growth processes in developing countries, sustainable agriculture, and rural development. Lastly, as part of the case study, students are expected to learn in detail about economic growth through agricultural cooperation and effect analysis of official development assistance (ODA).

This course discusses migration by situating it within broader social and economic context. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of human mobility, it conceives of migration as an intrinsic part of broader processes of economic and social change a, instead of as a "problem to be solved." Drawing on empirical and theoretical work, this course considers some contradictions and continuities in the way migration has been understood in social science scholarship. Students explore how migration impacts the economy and society, including some implications from a public health perspective. This course encourages students to critically assess migration not merely as an isolated phenomenon, but as an integral aspect of complex global flows of capital, labor, and cultural exchange. 

This course examines patterns of behavior that violate standard rationality assumptions, including behavioral aspects of individual decision making, such as temptation and present-biased preferences, prospect theory, reference-dependent preferences, and over-confidence. It also examines happiness research and behavioral public economics.

This course begins with an analysis of banking regulation. Due to the potentially enormous impact of bank runs, panics, and financial crises on the economy, the financial industry is heavily regulated. The course discusses the influence of regulations on the development of financial markets. In turn, the course addresses how the financial regulations had evolved in face of fast-growing financial innovations. Finally, we discuss how the central bank controls the supply of money and uses available tools to achieve the desired goals, the monetary transmission mechanisms, and how the public reacts to changes of monetary policies. The course also provides insight into the role of real estate markets and stock markets in the transmission of monetary policies and whether the central bank should react to the fluctuations of these asset prices.