Economics

This course covers the economics of financial institutions and markets as well as the role of central banks. It begins with an overview of the financial system and introduction to money and its role in the economy. The course then focuses on: (i) the behavior of interest rates; (ii) basic theories for stock prices; (iii) banks and bank management; (iv) the money supply process, and (v) the conduct of monetary policy.

This course focuses on the modern socioeconomic history of agriculture in China and the relationships between rural and urban; farm and industry; traditional and modern, and communism and capitalism.

The course aims to:

1. Understand the political economy of a non-industrial and non-western social system.
2. Learn how to distinguish between historical facts and present values.
3. Learn how to make meaningful comparisons between different societies and economies.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a basic understanding of the transformation of the Japanese economy in the late early-modern and modern times, while at the same time acquiring a multifaceted view of historical facts. The course introduces the characteristics of the transformation process of the Japanese economy in the late early modern period and the modern period (19th century to 20th century). In addition to macroscopic perspectives such as industry, distribution, and trade structures, the course also focuses on microscopic perspectives such as the way people worked and lived at the time and the transformation of society.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to a basic knowledge of the nature and workings of modern capitalist economies (welfare states), particularly in the West European and Anglo-Saxon countries.  The course focuses on government policy and its effects on countries’ economic performance, as measured by economic efficiency and growth; employment (or unemployment); income inequality, and poverty. The course seeks to answer the questions: What kind of policies do governments employ to promote economic performance? Are government policies effective in achieving positive economic outcomes? Is it possible to achieve economic growth and income equality simultaneously? If the answer is yes, what policy mix is instrumental? If the answer is no, why?

This course examines the performance and operation of imperfectly competitive markets, as well as the behavior of firms in these markets. The course looks at the effects of various business decisions and policy actions on the way firms compete. The course also explores how the need to motivate members of an organization and to coordinate their actions shapes the provision of incentives within the organization and the actual organization design. This allows a look at how organizational choices affect firms’ competitive behavior and rivals’ reactions. The course discusses topics including a review of fundamental concepts of game theory; the determinants of market power in static oligopolistic models; strategic positioning and advertising; the intensity of rivalry in dynamic oligopolistic models: collusive agreements; strategic and non-strategic barriers to entry; incentives within an organization: motivation; incentives within an organization: externalities and transfer prices; the strategic effects of organizational choices: horizontal mergers; and anti-trust intervention in oligopolistic markets. Students attending this course should be familiar with basic microeconomics concepts, in particular with the notion of Nash Equilibrium and Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium, with basic oligopolistic models (such as Bertrand and Cournot models of static competition) and with the fundamentals of unconstrained and constrained optimization problems.

This course is an introduction to economic principles in the analysis of environmental change and natural resource use and in designing appropriate policy responses. The first part of the course primarily covers the concepts and tools of environmental and resource economics, such as the evaluation of regulatory and market-based instruments in controlling pollution; moral suasion and voluntary regulation; the economics of renewable resources (e.g. fisheries); the economics of non-renewable resources (e.g., fossil fuels and minerals). The second part applies these concepts and tools to provide an economic perspective on real-world policy issues. Topics covered include the following: cost-benefit analysis and environmental valuation; stated and revealed preferences methods (and some behavioral considerations); sustainable development; biodiversity; climate change; energy; directed technological change and green innovation; health and the environment.

This course studies traditional open macroeconomic models and the role of monetary policy and exchange rates. It discusses currency and sovereign debt crises and the role of international coordination.

This course is about international financial economics (also known as international monetary economics): the movement of currencies and other financial assets across national boundaries. In this course, students will develop a set of analytic tools that can be used to analyze world economic policy debates. In particular, this course will examine the determination of exchange rates and how they are influenced by various economic phenomena such as interest rates, money supply, output, and unemployment. We will investigate different models of exchange rate determination and discuss how actual data supports or refutes these models.

Class meetings are interactive, usually beginning with a brief, student-led review of current events related to international finance. We then work through together, as a class, one of the models under study or look at some economic data and how it informs our understanding of the models under study. 

This course introduces the students to the behavioral finance view on asset pricing. The first part of the course takes a historical perspective on development of securities markets. The second part discusses the foundations of the efficient markets hypothesis which is the basis for the traditional "rational" view on asset pricing. The third and fourth parts focus on theoretical and empirical challenges facing the efficient markets hypothesis and consider the alternative "behavioral" interpretations of the pricing of securities. The specific topics include noise trading, investor sentiment, limits to arbitrage, overreaction and underreaction to news, excess volatility, return predictability, market boom and busts, institutional trends in market development.

This course takes both a short and a long-term view of the economy and helps students to understand how modern macroeconomics have attempted to explain economic growth as well as fluctuations. The course also looks at the design and effectiveness of macro policies to boost growth and stabilize fluctuations. Topics include measurement of the macroeconomy; long-run macroeconomic model and determinants of long-run growth; short-run macroeconomic model and its building blocks; and monetary and fiscal policies and their effectiveness.