Economics

This course evaluates the strategic decisions of economic agents and determines optimal action strategies. 

The course covers the following topics: 

• The importance of economic models
• Consumer decisions
• Firm decisions
• Individual choice under uncertainty
• Strategic decisions
• Static games with complete information
• Dynamic games with complete information

This course emphasizes both theoretical and empirical studies. Topics covered include: static and dynamic models of the demand for labor, allocation of time, the labor supply of men and women, labor unions, human capital theory, theories of personal income distribution, information and search theory, signaling and self-selection, implicit contracts and the principal-agent problem. Students should have knowledge of basic microeconomics and elementary calculus, and are advised to take ECON2011 and 2021 before taking this course.

This course provides a broad overview of Japanese economy, from postwar economic growth to current issues, and from domestic economic structure to international trade and finance.

Required course prerequisite: Basic understanding of Macroeconomics and mathematics.

This course applies economic concepts and techniques to analyze issues in health and health care. It explores the principles and techniques of economic evaluation of health interventions using the basic principles of epidemiology and examines health systems and health policy issues mainly in Japan. 

In this course students learn about the sources and determinants of economic inequality. Students begin by thinking about how we should understand top income and wealth concentration: The fact that rich people are so much higher than the rest (the so-called "1%." New and old theories of income and wealth concentration are studied. Students then think about what generates overall inequality. Is it luck? Higher education? Having rich or better educated parents? Finally, the course discusses how income inequality manifests itself, specifically whether income differences are mostly driven by education level, industries, or occupations.

The contents of this course are composed of six parts: introduction, life risk and life risk management, overview of life and health insurance, types analysis of life insurance, types analysis of health insurance and types analysis of accident injury insurance. Among them, analysis of various types of life insurance and analysis of various types of health insurance are the key points of teaching. In the teaching process the instructor constantly combines theory with practice, not only emphasizing the combination of a range of the theory and practice of life insurance, with the international practice and Chinese reality, integrating insurance innovation into insurance basic theory, knowledge and skills, but also taking on the latest research results and application techniques of domestic and foreign insurance academic and practice and fully considering the current development of China's life insurance industry, with the aim of providing intellectual support for the high-quality development of China's insurance industry and the building of an insurance powerhouse.

This course covers financial systems, currency, interest rates such as term and risk structure, and efficient markets. It also covers financial structures and banking management, financial regulation, financial crises in developed and emerging economies, central banks, money creation, monetary policy, intertemporal inconsistency, mechanisms of monetary policy transmission, transparency, communication and expectations, and inflation targeting.

This multidisciplinary course relates basic economic thinking to the real economy, covering the historical developments of economic institutions in the US and Japan as well as global strategies of Japanese corporations such as DeNA, Mercari, Suntory, Uniqlo, Seven Eleven and JR East, etc. The course also introduces related topics of FinTech and economic analysis of Law.. 

Focusing on "finance" as an essential element for societal systems transformation to achieve a sustainable society, this class explains the current role of finance in the sustainable development and environmental fields and their theoretical background. It focuses on the two types of environmental finance: 1) Finance related to international cooperation in which developed countries and others financially support developing countries to promote environmental measures in developing countries, and 2) The growing trend toward greening the financial system and the economy from the perspective of stabilizing the financial system. Beyond international environmental conventions, there is now an increasing number of initiatives by financial institutions and companies to address sustainability. 

This class introduces the expansion of environmental finance and its challenges today; introducing trends related to the United Nations; current discussions on sustainable finance and responses to climate and nature-related risks by financial institutions and companies, and the relationship with international environmental conventions. This class also discusses the expansion of environmental finance and its related governance.

This course teaches public finance at its introductory level. The course covers topics ranging from normative issues, such as why and how we need the government to intervene in the market economy, and how it intervenes in the economy in reality. An understanding of the recent controversy about the burden of the national debt and the fiscal situation of the Japanese central government is expected by the end of the course.

Required course prerequisite: Basic understanding of introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics.