Economics

This course examines health economics and policy. Topics include health insurance regulation, physician pricing, hospital pricing, and the value of health.

This course and its sequel, Econometrics 2, introduce modern econometric techniques. This course mainly focuses on classical regression analysis while Econometrics 2 discusses statistical causal inference. The statistical software R will be used occasionally in the course.  

Students who successfully complete the course will learn (i) the principles of regression analysis and (ii) how to implement regression analysis with R. 

This course focuses on important aspects of international financial management including the main characteristics of the international finance economics environment, the organization of foreign exchange markets, the role of various derivative instruments, and the origin and evolution of the current financial turmoil. 

Data science concerns the analysis of Big Data and is fast becoming an essential part of an economist's toolkit. Taking standard linear regression analysis as a starting point, this course introduces principles and methods from Machine Learning that enable economic analysis of Big Data. Machine Learning is focused on extracting information from complex data and automatically building good predictions. All analysis is conducted in R, an open-source statistical language for data analysis that is widely used in industry, government, and academia. Note: All students enrolled on this course are required to bring a laptop with them to tutorial sessions, in order to take part fully in teaching. If you do not own a laptop, the School encourages you to explore the University's laptop loan scheme.

This course uses an active learning approach to link economic tools and insights to real-world policy problems and solutions. This enables students to develop their own skills, knowledge, and experience of the role of economics in policymaking. Students are allocated to study groups, and work together to prepare weekly group presentations on policy case studies. These case studies are discussed in seminars using role play, along with weekly data visualization exercises in Excel. Students build confidence in understanding, analyzing, and producing the materials that are essential to economic policymaking.

This course teaches theory and policies related to international transactions of goods and services. Lectures will be given on both the positive theory of the international division of labor that analyzes the pattern of international trade and the normative theory of trade-related policies that examines economic effects and welfare implication of government policies.

This course is designed to introduce students to classical and new topics in international trade from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It covers standard and academic materials commonly studied by economists in academia as well as international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. After successfully completing this course, students will be able to demonstrate their knowledge of academic studies on international trade.

This course must be taken together with Environmental Economics B. 

Environmental economics is a branch of modern economics that studies economic behaviors of agents that have environmental consequences and thus attempts to help guide future environmental and resource policies. This course is designed to acquaint students with an intermediate level knowledge of the field. 

The course aims to:

1. Establish an understanding of economic principles that guide us in the study of environmental and resource problems --- i.e., Why do environmental and resource issues occur? Do economic incentives matter?
2. Discuss how different policy instruments, such as emissions taxes, green subsidies, and cap-and-trade programs, work differently under different situations.
3. Provide key topics, tools, and models of interest to environmental practitioners.

The course is divided into two parts: (1) International trade and (2) International macroeconomics. In the first part, the course introduces a number of models that help us understand the reasons why countries trade goods and services. Empirical evidence is provided to highlight the strengths and limitations of the introduced theories. In the second part, the course explores topics linked to the global macroeconomy. It presents a framework to analyze how the interdependence among countries shapes their economy-wide variables and draws links between theory and real world events. 

This course covers a wide range of topics in modern labor economics with theories and evidence. The course aims to acquaint students with major issues in labor economics and equip them with the economic tools necessary to understand the workings of the labor market. The course emphasizes the interaction between economic theory and empirical work. 

The course begins by introducing the classic economics of human capital and education, with the applications to schooling, job market signaling, job training, and occupational choice. Then it covers the basic theories and empirics on labor supply, labor demand, and labor market equilibrium, linking to topics such as home production, technological change, and minimum wage. After that, two alternative frameworks for understanding wage structure, compensating differential and sorting, will be considered. Last, the course studies several important issues regarding the labor market: job search and unemployment, institutions and policies, and discriminations. Upon successful completion of the course, the students would be able to link theoretical concepts to real-world labor market phenomena and utilize appropriate economics tools to analyze them. The course also prepares students for further study in the field of labor economics.

This course familiarizes students with the way in which science & technology interact with the economy on different scales illustrated by empirical data and introduces them to the notion of engineering production functions and their relation to ordinary production functions and how they are amended by technological progress. The course also introduces students to analyzing scientific progress and Science through knowledge engineering relations and gives them hands-on experience in modeling technological progress in growth models. It gives students insight in science & technology funding and the distinct roles played by private investors and governments, a proper grasp of the key international and national institutions facilitating and/or funding scientific research, an introductory knowledge of how to model networks and the flow of information or other assets through networks.