Economics

The main topics covered in this course are financial risk analysis and financial risk. The course provides students with a thorough understanding of market risk from both a practical and technical point of view. A representative list of topics covered includes empirical properties of market prices (fat tails, volatility clusters) and forecasting of conditional volatility; concepts of financial risk (volatility, Value-at-Risk); univariate and multivariate volatility models (ARCH, GARCH); implementation and evaluation of risk forecasts; and endogenous risk. Students apply the models to real financial data using Matlab/Python/R, a programming environment widely used in industry and academia. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed.

This is a contemporary history (from late 20th century to current period) course on East Asia surveyed through the lens of multidisciplinary area studies. It highlights select important themes in political-economic developments that may potentially lead to better understanding of contemporary East Asian regionalism and affairs. These political-economic themes can be found in the case studies on East Asian regionalism, energy use, soft power, technological developments (including military-industrial complex). The course materials are also divided into three major regions of focus: Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and US-Pacific presence. This course does not pretend to be comprehensive but provides class participants with the essential knowledge to analyze and understand contemporary East Asian political-economic affairs and development.

This course is about the economic effects of taxation, and economic aspects of tax policy. It gives students an understanding of the key economic issues in tax policy, and shows how these can be analyzed using standard tools of theoretical and empirical economic analysis.

In this course, welfare economics, public choice theory, social justice, as well as socialism and market economies are examined using recent papers. It discusses political thoughts, social philosophy, and ethics through tools of neo-classical economic theories like public choice theory and game theory. More specifically, this course studies the economics of Network effects. It first examines the literature on direct network effects developed in the late 70s and 80s, followed by a look at the literature on indirect network effects developed in the early 2000 through what is known as platform economics, or two-sided markets. 

This advanced-level lecture course covers standard topics of microeconomics. The first half looks at basic price theory and market efficiency, and the second half focuses on market failures (such as market power and asymmetric information) and analyzes whether or not the basic properties of competitive markets are continuing to hold. The course will also introduce game theory and its application as a basic tool.

This course provides a survey of environmental policy from the perspective of economics. Topics include principles of environmental economics, air pollution, and waste management. It focuses on the application of economic concepts to the analysis of environmental policy and the consequences of economic behavior on the environment. The main aim of the course is to learn how basic economic concepts can be applied to the analysis of economic and social incentives concerning individual and collective decision-making in the context of the environment. Prerequisite: Principle of Microeconomics. 

This is an advanced course considering the economic forces that govern the geographic distribution of economic activity and its implications for economic outcomes and public policy issues. The course is divided into two parts. The first part develops a simple theory of cities as the result of the interaction between agglomeration and congestion forces. It studies in detail the agglomeration forces that attract firms, consumers, and workers to cities, as well as the congestion forces that limit the size of cities and how to overcome them through transportation networks and housing markets. The second part of the course extends the basic model to study a system of many locations, the dynamics of city growth and decline, and to conclude, the role of cities and geography for climate change.

The course discusses the key economic policy areas of the European Union and offers an analysis of the different approaches to regional economic integration throughout the history of the European Union. The course analyzes the economic bases for the rise of the European Union from its origins in the post-World War II recovery to its historic enlargements in 2004 and 2007. The accession of the new Central and Eastern European Member-States (most recently Croatia in 2013) poses new challenges for the EU. Since Europe accounts for one-quarter of the global economy, half of the global trade, and a substantial part of world's capital markets, this course also looks at the impact of the European Union on other trading blocs like NAFTA. Competitiveness is the key word for globalization and the course focuses on different forms of market integration used inside the EU and discusses consequences for both competition policy and industrial policy. The theory of the economic integration process is applied to a business setting, with a series of business cases illustrating how a variety of firms are responding strategically to the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union, Brexit, and the accession of new Member-States. Students are given advice and guidance on using case studies and how to evaluate the strategies and choices made by firms. Special attention is given to the present problems of the Euro crisis and corresponding consequences for national tax policies within the EU. The course may include a field trip.

This course provides intermediate econometric techniques used in empirical analysis, including least square estimation, serial correlation, simultaneous equation, granger causality, panel data analysis, logit regression and difference-in-difference approach. We focus on practical training using personal computer and statistic package of either Stata or R. Grade is determined by the terminal paper test and a report of empirical analysis.

This course begins with a historical perspective on the development of current economic and tech-structures, asking what is actually new. It then examines types of tech economies and forms of valuation, considering topics such as credit (e)valuations, the power of platforms, the producers of technology such as software engineers and users, prediction algorithms, digital money and markets, and surveillance capitalism. Anthropologists and social scientists from adjacent disciplines have the potential to contribute to both academic and public debates regarding economies of technology by engaging both critically and productively with the way that technology is shaping society and making specific assertions about what is “of value." Students develop their own argument about the changing economies of technology during the course using an empirical case and present their own case for feedback at a workshop, before writing the final essay. This course builds knowledge, skills, and competencies to engage with the current developments in tech by building on classical as well as current theoretical perspectives from fields including economic and digital anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies.