Economics

This course introduces students to basic principles of Macroeconomics and their applications to business. In addition to covering basic economic principles, the course will expose students to how the various principles apply to individual and business decision making. Topics to be covered include measurement of economic activity at the macroeconomic level, gross domestic product and related concepts, inflation, unemployment, fiscal and monetary policy.

This course focuses on the analysis, tools, and knowledge of microeconomics for business. The course applies economics to business issues, and each topic is introduced assuming no previous knowledge of the subject. Examples are taken from the real world to show how economic analysis and models can be used to understand the different parts of business and how policy has been used to intervene in the working of the economy.

The rise of China and India, along with other big emerging economies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has shifted the focus of future corporate governance research and reforms to the way these economies finance and govern their companies. This course examines in detail the various typologies, systems, and models of corporate governance in emerging economies, and identifies the key drivers of corporate governance evolution in these countries. A focus of the course is to look at issues of convergence to and/or divergence from the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance and how such issues are reshaping our understanding of the underlying goals and assumptions of future corporate governance research and reforms in these economies.

In this course the correlation between economics and law are examined by analyzing the main fields of law using the economic notions and methods studied so far. The literature of law and economics examines the problems related to incentives, cost of transaction, and risk that form the basis of legislation and the extent to which individual legal rules produce the desired effect. The following fields of law are discussed in particular: property law, contract law, liability law, procedural law and criminal law. Through this course students are able to analyze legal issues by means of microeconomic theoretic tools (incentive, cost of transaction and risk analysis) and develop policy based on insights derived from the domain where economics and law coincide. Students are expected to have basic knowledge of economics at the level of the Microeconomics and Institutions or Principles of Microeconomics.

This course is the additional work for the course : "THE WORLD ECONOMY IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY". This course, while giving an outline of global economic developments over the recent past and their implications in today's world, focuses on key moments and areas in the history of the twentieth century, sometimes referred to as “the short twentieth century,” starting in 1914 and ending in 1989. This course covers through the year 2000.

This course offers an exploration of the intellectual framework or public economics. The course discusses questions including should we encourage government intervention in the economy and on what grounds, what are the different instruments the government can use in order to achieve its goals and what should these goals be. The course builds on robust theoretical and empirical arguments, together with sound institutional analyses, in order to achieve an in-depth understanding of government reasons to intervene and ways of intervention. The course examines topics including government expenditure, deficit, and debt; education; social and health insurance; pension systems; taxation and progressivity; taxation incidence; optimal taxation; income taxation; consumption taxation; and inequality and redistribution. Students complete a written midterm and written final exam.

This course uses analytical tools from economics to study the determinants and the different facets of world poverty. The course discusses the causes of poverty differences across countries, the measurement of poverty and inequality, the logic behind poverty traps and cash transfers, and the determinants of economic decision-making among poor households. Students consider the constraints that the poor face in their daily lives and what governments do to eradicate poverty. While covering these topics, the course explores the various dimensions of the economic lives of the poor, including health and nutrition, education, access to credit and insurance, land markets and inequality, rural/urban migration, and gender discrimination. Throughout the course, students also study examples of actual policy interventions designed to reduce poverty, as well as the methods used to evaluate their impact.