Economics

This course explores different aspects of the relationship between language and economy, looking at the economic value of language; the linguistic side of the economy, and how the relationship between economic and linguistic forces help shapes today's global world. 

This course teaches students the tools required to develop, simulate, and explore economic models using a computer. It may also be of relevance to economics students who wish to develop coding skills.
 

The course covers the analytical tools and techniques that are necessary to examine a wide variety of fixed income securities and their derivatives. Fixed income securities are financial instruments whose cashflows are fixed and determined in advance. The instruments we cover include treasury and corporate bonds, bond futures, and interest rate swaps. After introducing the notion of yields, duration and convexity, and term structure models, we discuss the evaluation and the risk management of fixed income investments.

The aim of this course is to provide students with the introductory theory of fixed income securities and its applications to the investments. After completing the course, the students will: (i) Be familiar with the basic concepts such as yields, duration and convexity; (ii) Develop and apply the tools for pricing and hedging the fixed income securities; (iii) Understand the theoretical models for the pricing of fixed income securities, and (iv) Master the interest rate derivatives and its applications for hedging and risk management.

This class presents the main principles of international political economy, also known as global political economy, which studies globalization and the reciprocal interaction between international relations, economics, and politics. Gathering knowledge from history, international relations, politics, economics, and sociology in an innovative way, the course provides a broad overview of the frameworks of analysis, actors, institutions, issues, and processes responsible for international relations, the causes of war, inter-state economic competition, and the structural configuration of power in the global context. It analyzes global affairs from a three-dimensional perspective: statist logic, market logic, and institutional logic. The course relies on readings, class debates, and the study of factual cases to develop academic skills and apply these skills for professional outcomes. 

The purpose of this course is to provide adequate perspectives and concepts for the exploration of the dynamic implications of the interactions between the economy and the environment. The aim is to enable students to understand clearly how the many actions and forces embedded in the economy-environment system interact with each other to give rise to actual and potential conflicts between economic growth and environmental sustainability, the resulting environmental external costs arising from environment-economy interactions, and their implications for planning and administering a delicate balancing act between economic and environmental sustainability. The course also seeks to enhance students’ mastery of coordinate and practical knowledge of sustainability management by tying learning and knowledge from different domains to environmental economic issues in real-life situations. This is intended to develop students’ critical thinking and cross-disciplinary analytical skills in problem-solving which is key to academic and career advancement.
 

The course then discusses the structure of environmental value; the relationship between value orientation or value-belief norm theory in environmental choices and economic preferences; the economic and environmental assumptions governing the costs and benefits of growth and environmental sustainability; the properties of natural capital, and their implications for environmental and resource conservation, among other subjects of interest.

Based on a historical approach, this course questions the various theoretical models of development and their extensions in economic policy. It discusses the various "developmental" approaches of the 1950s and 1970s which made underdevelopment an international problem and whose solution must be found at the national level. It then examines the vision adopted from the 1980s onwards which saw it as a national problem to be tackled at the international level, leading to a homogenization of development strategies underlying structural adjustment. Finally, faced with the (at least relative) failure of the various decades of development, and while underdevelopment remains one of the major issues of the 21st century, the course considers the current focus on reducing poverty and inequality, while the concept of sustainable development is being promoted.

Public Economics analyzes the market failure and the function of the government, specifically what the government should do in a market economy. This course covers the basic principle of public economics, especially the role of the government and the rationale for the policy, in a framework of applied microeconomics. The course teaches the standard approach of public economics, which is the foundation of economic analysis in any policy issue. It assumes that students are familiar and comfortable with basic concepts of microeconomics that includes, for example, the method of Lagrange multiplier and Slutsky Equation.

This course introduces students to the field of environmental economics. They discuss and analyze how markets, without policy intervention, fail to capture environmental externalities. They then discuss the possible regulatory measures and policy instruments available to correct such market failures yielding what might be the socially optimal level of pollution. The course introduces various environmental valuation techniques that help identifying the costs and benefits of controlling environmental externalities. 

This course provides students an introduction to recent developments in the migration and job search literature. Students learn how to formulate and solve dynamic models, and apply these models to analyze a range of topics including migration, employment transitions, and wage dispersion across workers. Throughout the course, analysis is linked to the current debate on migration and other labor market policies.

The course introduces the topic of monetary systems in theory and in practice. It focuses on how today's international monetary systems have developed historically and, in particular, how today's monetary system may facilitate or impede the transition to a sustainable economy.