Economics

Over the past centuries, economics has changed from a largely verbal discipline that studied human agency in commercial settings, to a mathematical discipline that incorporates scientific instruments such as statistics and laboratory practices. This course retraces this past and to see how modern economics emerged to its present form. Students assess the development of economic ideas, theories, and methods in their appropriate historical context with emphasize on incisive change of the economic discipline from the interwar to the post-war period. The primary objective is to enable students to historically assess the merits and limitations of contemporary economics in addressing major economic and social questions. 
 

This course critiques the popular narrative of "growth" and "development" globally. It reviews various criticisms of global growth with an emphasis on the most radical, considering whether infinite growth is desirable, in order to better understand the ecological, social, and political issues at stake.

This course introduces the current state of political economy. It discusses the theoretical models of voting, electoral competition, interest group politics, non-democratic politics, and political transition. The course provides an understanding of the main theoretical models and the recent empirical research testing these models.

This course examines the main concepts and theories of organizational economics within an integrated framework. Topics include: individual behavior in business and markets; the structure and management of individual and divisional incentives; the interaction between organizations and their environment, not only economic but also political and institutional.

To improve the performance of a firm, managers have to find tools to hire the right people, sort them into the right job, motivate them to do their work well, develop their skills through formal and informal learning, and cooperate efficiently with co-workers. Firms that stimulate one aspect might do so at the cost of others. Managers, therefore, face many complex trade-offs in their personnel policies. In this course, economic tools to understand these trade-offs are discussed and illustrated with examples of how to apply them in practice. Questions posed in the course include: Why should pay vary across workers within firms – and how "compressed" should pay be within firms? Should firms pay workers for their performance on the job or for their skills or hours of work? How are pay and promotions structured across jobs to induce optimal effort from employees? How are jobs designed and performance measures? Why use teams and how are teams used most effectively? How should all these human resource management practices, from incentive pay to teamwork, be combined within firms?

The course provides an introduction to, and survey of, the theory of welfare economics. Studets examine the broad philosophical and legal basis of a market economy, paying particular attention to the issues of property rights and the rule of law. Students then explore the issue of collective benefits arising from public goods, highlighting the information problem associated with the optimal provision of such goods. This is followed by a detailed discussion of externalities, where, among other things, students study the different ways in which they are addressed: private solutions, public policy, and prohibition of markets.