Economics

The course introduces students to the interplay between trade, migration, and issues such as inequality, environmental degradation, and global politics. It equips students with the analytical tools and essential knowledge necessary to engage in contemporary debates on these issues, helping them to gain a deeper understanding of the interconnected dynamics in the globalized economy. The course covers both theoretical concepts and empirical studies. Students will understand the key theories and concepts underlying international trade and migration and have developed an awareness of how trade and migration trends are influenced by and contribute to challenges in areas like the labor market, environmental sustainability, or social cohesion. For the final examination, students are expected to demonstrate their ability to critically evaluate and discuss the relationship between trade or migration and at least one of the challenges discussed throughout the course.

This course examines economic history and its persistent impact on economic development in the context of China. Particular attention will be paid to explaining the missing industrialization in the Ming-Qing period and the historical roots of China’s recent economic rise. To this end, the course will compare China to the West in terms of culture, institutions, human capital, and other fundamental forces of development, and will employ historical data and econometric tools to examine the economic impacts of these fundamentals. 

Industrial organization is a branch of microeconomics that studies markets of imperfect competition. When the number of competitors is small and competition is imperfect, each individual firm faces situations of strategic interaction among the market participants (consumers, competitors, or suppliers). Using game theoretic tools, this course studies various market structures and the competitive and cooperative strategies used by profit-maximizing firms as well as their implications for market outcomes and regulation policies. Topics include Markets and strategies, Static oligopoly competition, Dynamic oligopoly competition, Source of market power, Price discrimination, Impact of asymmetric information, Cartels and collusion, Horizontal mergers, and Vertically-related markets.

Prerequisite: Game Theory

This course is an introduction to the field of health economics, a rapidly growing field of applied economics. Economic concepts such as scarcity, incentives, marginal analysis, profit maximization, and cost-minimization will be used throughout this course. Students will analyze this important sector using economic analysis methods.  

Topics include the production of health capital; demand-and-supply analysis of health and medical care; the production of health; asymmetric information in insurance markets; the role of government in the provision of health care; economics of mental health and happiness; and health policy debates in developing countries. 

In this course the views of a number of classical thinkers on capitalism will be discussed: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty. What was, in their view, the nature of capitalism? Which problems does the system have? And how should these shortcomings be remedied?

This course examines the conditions and causes of long run growth from nomadism to agriculture to industrialized states, including institutions, geography, culture, colonialism, and slave trades. It covers determinants of the Neolithic, consumer and industrial revolutions, demographic transition and first era of globalization. 

This course examines the empirical evaluation of (human resource) management practices in organizations. A brief introduction provides an overview of the fundamentals of experimental economic research. Subsequently, empirical studies on the causal effects of HR practices on employee behavior are discussed. The course trains students how to use experimental economics for the evaluation of causal effects of management practices in organizations. Students read, analyze and discuss various studies from organizational economics and practice their critical reflection. The reading list of the course includes studies on topics such as monetary and non-monetary incentives, leadership instruments, teams, feedback, recruitment, training. Tutorials are integrated into the lectures and the aim of the tutorial is to deepen the contents discussed in the lecture.

This course examines the major public policies toward business in Canada, such as competition policy, regulation, public ownership and privatization, industrial policies, and trade policies. It includes comparison with policies of other countries, especially the U.S. 

This course examines different farm management and agribusiness management practices and approaches in the agricultural and horticultural sectors. Drawing from multidisciplinary perspectives, the course provides students with understanding of the key approaches, issues and themes relating to strategic management in agribusiness (theories, planning), organization theory (explanatory approaches, design principles), interorganizational coordination (cooperation, chain management), fundamentals of innovation and knowledge management, basics of information and knowledge management, and business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

This course examines option pricing and hedging. It will concentrate on the theory and idea of derivatives pricing and risk management. Topics include option market; European and American options; conditional expectation and discrete-time martingale, discrete-time option pricing theory; true probabilities vs. risk-neutral probabilities; estimating volatility; the Black-Scholes formula; implied volatility; option Greeks; market-making and hedging; and exotic options.