Economics

This course focuses on the introduction of dynamic modeling and its application for policy analysis. The aim is to provide an understanding of the reasons for government policy intervention in the economy; analyze the benefits of possible government policies, and the response of economic agents to the government's actions. The course covers tax policy and inequality, social insurance programs, and public goods. Special emphasis is on current policy issues such as inequality and poverty, health care reform, income tax reform, and budget deficits. 

This course is a study of consumer behavior and the variables affecting the purchasing decision process. It reviews the characteristics of consumer behavior, including internal variables such as motivations of buying behavior and the perception of marketing stimuli, as well as external socio-cultural demographic variables.

This course discusses game theory for economic analysis at the undergraduate level. For undergraduate students, the course, Intro to Game Theory, is a prerequisite. Students are also expected to have a basic knowledge of mathematics such as basic differentiation and basic probability theory.

The course aims to teach formal concepts in game theory and provide hands on experience in solving games with different solution concepts.

This course introduces key concepts and major issues of urban and regional economics for students with a knowledge of economic and econometric analysis at the undergraduate level. It emphasizes the role of market forces in the development of cities. Recent advances and empirical evidence are used to cover the following topics: market forces in the development of cities (spatial equilibrium, agglomeration and congestion forces, and transportation costs); land rents and land-use patterns (urban land rents, land-use patterns, neighborhood choice, zoning, and growth controls); urban transportation; housing; urban distress; and cities and public policy.

This course analyses how institutions shape economics policies in modern democracies. The course covers the tools and looks at some of the frontier research in the field. Topics include collective choice and voting, political accountability, redistribution, media, immigration, and populism.

This course provides students with the fundamental tools to understand financial decision-making in the modern corporation. Topics include: capital budgeting/corporate investment, capital structure, corporate sources of funding, dividend policy, corporate contingent claims for financial risk management. The course frames these topics within the standard theories of risk and return, valuation of assets, and market structure.

The course focuses on the following topics:

• Financial Planning and Analyzing financial performance
• Capital budgeting (NPV, IRR and payback period)
• Capital budgeting and risk (asset beta and equity beta)
• Financing decisions and the firm cost of capital
• Capital issuing (seasoned equity offers, IPOs and venture capital)
• Corporate risk management

This course examines a wide range of quantitative methods for the empirical analysis of microeconomic decisions. Topics include: maximum likelihood estimator; qualitative binary decisions-- binary choice models; other qualitative dependent variable models-- ordered, multivariant, and counting models; decisions with corner solutions-- censored models; Monte Carlos simulation. Pre-requisites: An introductory course in Econometrics. Knowledge of the econometric software gretl is recommended.

Social media is an important part of our everyday lives, for better or worse. It has the power to bring people together but also to threaten democracy. This course looks at social media through an economics lens, analyzing how it shapes the incentives of users, platforms, firms, news organizations, politicians, and governments. To do so, it reviews basic models of individual and firm behavior, borrowing tools from the most “rational” economic frameworks but also covering important psychological biases from the behavioral economics literature. Armed with this toolkit, the course reviews frontier empirical literature, studying questions such as: How can we incentivize the production of “good” content and mitigate harmful content? Are the incentives of platforms aligned with users’ interests? What are the consequences of social media algorithms optimizing for engagement? Do algorithms cause echo chambers? What are the political effects of social media? Does it harm users? This course contributes to the education program by showcasing how to apply economic knowledge to answer some of the most pressing challenges in our society.

This course is intended to give a greater understanding of monetary and financial policy within the global economy, with a focus on historical policy developments, current debates, and the institutional structure of central banks and regulatory agencies in the United States, Japan, China, and Europe. After building an analytical toolset, we will look at how these institutions dealt with significant economic problems in a series of case studies like the Great Recession in the United States, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the stock market collapse in Japan, and the challenges of property markets and local debt in China. We will use these case studies to better understand topics such as unconventional monetary policy, problems of debt, and reform of the global financial system. We will finally examine contemporary debates around inflation policy, international spillovers, and policy coordination.

This course provides students with an understanding of factors that determine how industries are organized. It presents various theoretical models, whether and how these are supported by empirical evidence, and stylized facts. Concepts and tools employed in microeconomic theory and game theory are used to analyze how firms behave within industries and how industries are structured.