Economics

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.

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.