Economics

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.

This course applies microeconomic reasoning to the study of the public sector. It surveys the scope and different modes of public intervention in the economy, with particular emphasis on the welfare state and income redistribution. It discusses the provision and financing of public and private goods and the design of tax systems.

This course studies important economic problems that emerged in Japan in the last few decades as well as their causes. The goal of the class is to deepen an understanding of contemporary Japanese economy and its relations to the world economy.

The course aims provides students with a thorough understanding of core techniques of quantitative economics and econometrics and their application to test economic theories and measure magnitudes relevant for economic policy and other decisions, as a foundation for subsequent study of quantitative topics within the degree programme, and as one of the key elements in the professional training of an economist.

Chinese political economy covers both major theoretical and practical perspectives of exploring Chinese political economy. This course will focus on the political and economic reforms in China since the beginning of the reform and opening-up. It will utilize theoretical perspectives from political science, economics and sociology to systematically analyze the key theoretical and practical issues of China's reform. These issues include the party-state relationship, state capacity, cadre selection and promotion, fiscal and taxation reforms, central-local relations, digital political economy, and government responsiveness. The course aims to clarify the core logic and operational mechanisms of China's reform，and clarify the key advantages of Chinese political economy institutions. The design, content and format of this course are aimed optimally to benefit students in both knowledge accumulation and practical orientation.