Economics

This course examines challenges posed by poverty affecting a billion people in low-income countries across the world as targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals and taking an economic approach to conceptualizing those challenges, their causes, and solutions. The course provides theoretical frameworks to understand, measure, analyze, and discuss themes within the development economics literature focusing on poverty, its consequences, and its alleviation. Key questions discussed during the course include: What is the state of progress towards relevant SDGs? What is life like when living with under a dollar a day? Are famines unavoidable? Is child labor necessary? Is education and health key to lifting people out of poverty? Does growth help the poorest of the poor? And, does aid matter for development? What is the relationship between environment and development, and how does climate change affect them? What role do sustainable food systems play in addressing both climate change and food insecurity? The course includes the following thematic topics: poverty and inequality; economic growth and development; health and education; agricultural transformation; aid; poverty, conflicts, and corruption; environment and development; sustainable food systems. 

This course examines city and regional economics in relation to the practice of city planning. It covers a range of key economic concepts and models that shape urban land uses, and urban housing and labor market systems. It encompasses the following main areas: micro/macroeconomic processes that drive urban land use, governance and planning systems; market failures as the source of urban planning problems; development feasibility; and the economic theories of urbanization, gentrification and technological transformation.

This course examines behavioral economics, which incorporates insights from psychology and neuroscience into economic analysis. It covers decision-making under uncertainty, decision-making over time, social preferences, and non-standard beliefs. It will relate theories to empirical evidence and applications, including procrastination, labor supply, finance, and policymaking. 

This course explores topics in international accounting such as: the regulatory framework; accounting policies, estimates, and errors; fair value measurement; borrowing costs; government grants; intangible assets; financial reporting in hyperinflationary economies; foreign exchange rates; earnings per share. Pre-requisites: Introduction to Accounting; Financial Accounting.

This course aims to help students understand the significance, theories, and research methods of pharmaceutical economics and its applications in pharmaceutical policies. It also introduces pharmaceutical market promotion strategies and key approaches. The course fosters logical reasoning, critical thinking, and analytical skills.

This is an advanced course in corporate finance, with the goal of bringing students to the frontier of knowledge so that they can start doing their own research in this field. 

This course focuses on nine topics in applied corporate finance:

(1)Topics related to accounting irregularities and misreporting;

(2)Topics related to the CEO's early life experience and CEO management styles;

(3)Topics related to the Fetal origins hypothesis; 

(4)Topics related to the issues of climate change risk and opportunities exposures, pollution on investor behavioral bias, and on corporate policies, and Greenwashing versus brownwashing;

(5)Topics related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies;

(6)Topics related to token-based platform finance and B2B financing;

(7)Topics related to innovation & entrepreneurship;

(8) Topics related to intergenerational persistence of occupational choice, and 

(9) Trending topics, including water quality. 

In developed countries, social security expenditures, such as public pension, health care and long-term care, account for a substantial part of the total expenditures of the public sector. The design of the social security system is an important policy issue in Japan, which is facing a rapidly aging population with a declining birthrate, as well as skyrocketing public debt. This course provides an overview of Japan's social security system and the economic theories behind the system.

This course examines how individuals or firms make decisions about the demand for or supply of a product, how we can determine the efficiency of a market, and how we evaluate the costs and benefits of trade or government interventions in the society. 

This course examines the prominent sources of labor precarity and how workers – across different institutional settings – respond to these threats. The course covers phenomena such as workplace technological change/automation, international trade, green transition, as well as their consequences, including growing inequality, the revival of the radical right, protectionism, and demand for redistributive policies.

This course provides an analysis of multi-sided platform businesses like those run by Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Tencent that dominate the current economy. Students will examine the economic and strategic questions these business raise that that policymakers and market participants are grappling with and the unique economic issues pertaining to these businesses. Topics include (i) the economic features of multi-sided platforms (e.g.., definitions of platforms, network externalities, pricing and competition between platforms); (ii) strategic issues faced by platforms (e.g., launching, platform design, leakage, revenue model); (iii) emerging policy issues (e.g., platform mergers, self-preferencing, abuse of dominance). This course has pre-requisites in microeconomics.