Global Arc

The microeconomic theory of individual decision making under uncertainty and economic interaction under asymmetric information. Topics include expected utility, value of information, risk-sharing in insurance and asset markets, contracting with moral hazard and adverse selection, and auctions. Applications include health insurance and finance. Prerequisites: 300, MAT 175 or equivalent, and basic probability. Two lectures, one precept.

This class will cover the economics of gender, especially focusing on women's role in the economy. We will cover workplace discrimination, policies to promote gender equality, the historical evolution of economic gender roles in the US, and initiatives to promote women's empowerment in developing countries.

This course builds on ECO302/312. It will introduce students to additional econometric methods. The emphasis will be on methods that are useful for applied microeconomics. Topics will include simple methods for program evaluation: instrumental variables estimation, regression discontinuity, sample selection models, matching methods and construction of bounds. The course will also introduce econometric models that should be part of any empirical economist's toolbox. This includes discrete choice, quantile regression and duration and models. The course will attempt to emphasize the usefulness of the methods more than the technical details.

This course covers the evolution of racial inequality in the US, with a focus on Black-white economic disparities. We will study racial gaps in income and wealth over the 20th century and examine the role of public policy in mitigating or exacerbating this inequality. Students will come away with an understanding of key episodes of racial progress and will hone their data science skills by analyzing historical data to make evidence-based proposals for reducing group-based inequality. Finally, the course will build students' research literacy by supplementing readings of technical papers with policy briefs, podcasts, and op-eds.

An economic analysis of the structure of markets and of corporate behavior. The development and interpretation of public policies, including antitrust legislation and direct regulation related to market structure, corporate mergers, restrictive and discriminatory practices, advertising, and research and development. Two lectures, one class. Prerequisites: 300 or 310, and MAT 175 or equivalent.

This course introduces basic concepts and methods in time series analysis with applications in macroeconomics. Emphasis is placed on developing an understanding of how the techniques work, and when they are most suitable for applications. Applications will focus on fiscal and monetary policies, exchange rate regimes, international capital flows, and economic growth. The lectures are designed so that students will understand the basic ideas, while a set of homework assignments has been prepared to allow the students to dig deeper into the material, as well as providing hands-on experience in estimating time series models.

This course discusses several ways in which market outcomes fail to be efficient. It introduces alternative notions of efficiency that are adapted to different environments. A first part of the course discusses externalities and public goods, also discussed in introductory classes. However, policy remedies are addressed in more depth. A second part of the course discusses missing markets and property rights. A third part of the course discusses informational asymmetric, going from search frictions to adverse selection and moral hazard.

An introduction to the economics of law. Application of price theory and welfare analysis to problems and actual cases in the common law - property, contracts, torts - and to criminal and constitutional law. Topics include the Coase Theorem, intellectual property, product liability, deterring crime, incarceration as punishment, and social choice. Prerequisite: ECO 100. Two 90-minute lectures.

This class studies how to solve problems of economic resource allocation via markets. The first half will focus on matching markets. We will study how to assign students to schools, kidneys to patients, workers to jobs and so forth. In the second half we will study auctions. We will discuss how they can be used to discover price in various environments and their use to allocate goods such as advertising, financial assets or radio spectrum. Throughout the course we will discuss the issues underlying the design of successful marketplaces. The course will emphasize applications and connections between the different problems.

This course considers firms, markets and competition. We will study the theory of industrial organization, focusing on models of the way firms make decisions and compete and the impact of those decisions on market outcomes such as prices, quantities, the type of products offered and social welfare. This is a more math-focused version of ECO 321. For most topics considered, we will write down and solve a model of firm behavior, before considering real-world examples of the phenomenon the model seeks to analyze. We will use the examples to assess the model's ability to capture real-world outcomes.