Results for ECON

The economic way of thinking and the functioning of a modern market economy. The behavior of consumers and firms. Markets for goods and inputs. Analysis of macroeconomic variables: output, employment, inflation, interest rate. Determination of long-run growth and short-term fluctuations. The role of government: regulation, monetary, and fiscal policy.

Seminar in applied economics with focus on the microcosm of Silicon Valley, how growth companies are originated, managed and financed from start-up to IPO. Round-table discussion format. Applicable to those students with an interest in technology company formation, growth and finance including interaction with Wall Street. Enrollment limited to 10 juniors, seniors and co-term students.

Welfare reform passed by the Federal Government in 1996 heralded a dramatic step in how our nation designs and operates its programs that support poor families. The centerpiece of this legislation known as 'devolution' transferred much responsibility for these programs to the states. States had their first opportunity since the 'war on poverty' of the 1960s to undertake radical changes in setting up their public assistance programs. Recently, many of the reforms instituted in the 1990s are being hotly debated and in some aspects reversed. What flexibility did the states receive under welfare reform, and what considerations are relevant in exercising this flexibility? What selections have states made, and how are their programs and those of the federal government likely to evolve in the future? This seminar will address these questions, exploring how reforms changed welfare and who has been affected by these changes. In addition to covering the patchwork of different programs that currently constitute America's social safety net, the seminar will also scrutinize the makeup and trends in government spending and how our nation defines poverty and eligibility for income support. Moreover, the discussion will illustrate the role that economics plays in assessing the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs and the consequences on families' behavior. Students will participate in a project in which they develop their own recommendations for devising a safety net for poor families in America.

One of the central challenges for policymakers is how to make sure the United States remains the world's strongest economy and continues to create good paying jobs. Discusses what the proper role of government should be when it comes to our economy by exploring the history of American economic thought dating back to Alexander Hamilton. Considers the perspective of classical economists, Keynsian economists, and economists identifying themselves as part of the innovation school of economics. Examines various policy alternatives concerning taxes, regulations, immigration, and investment that can foster economic growth.

Individual consumer and firm behavior under perfect competition. The role of markets and prices in a decentralized economy. Monopoly in partial equilibrium. Economic tools developed from multivariable calculus using partial differentiation and techniques for constrained and unconstrained optimization. Prerequisites taken for letter grades: Econ 1 or 1A or 1V, and Math 51 or CME 100 or CME 100A. Must be taken for a Letter grade if majoring/minoring in Economics.

Long-run economic growth and short-run economic fluctuations. Focus on the macroeconomic tools of government: fiscal policy (spending and taxes) and monetary policy, and their effects on growth, employment, and inflation. Prerequisites: ECON 50.

Economic policy analysis, writing, and oral presentation. Topics vary with instructor. Limited enrollment. Prerequisites: Econ 51 and 52, 102B, and two field courses. Some sections require additional prerequisites.

Probabilistic modeling and statistical techniques relevant for economics. Concepts include: probability trees, conditional probability, random variables, discrete and continuous distributions, correlation, central limit theorems, point estimation, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals for both one and two populations. Prerequisite: MATH 20 or MATH 41 or equivalent.

The primary course goal is for students to master the logic, intuition and operation of a financial system - money, financial markets (money and capital markets, debt and equity markets, derivatives markets), and financial institutions and intermediaries (the Central Bank, depository institutions, credit unions, pension funds, insurance companies, venture capital firms, investment banks, mutual funds, etc.). In other words, how money/capital change hands between agents over time, directly and through institutions. Material will be both quantitative and qualitative, yet always highly analytical with a focus on active learning - there will be an approximately equal emphasis on solving mathematical finance problems (e.g. option pricing) and on policy analysis (e.g. monetary policy and financial regulation.) Students will not be rewarded for memorizing and regurgitating facts, but rather for demonstrating the ability to reason with difficult problems and situations with which they might not previously be familiar. Prerequisite: Econ 50, 52. Strongly recommended but not required: some familiarity with finance and statistics (e.g. Econ 135 or 140, Econ 102A)

Institutional, theoretical, and empirical analysis of the problems of health and medical care. Topics: demand for medical care and medical insurance; institutions in the health sector; economics of information applied to the market for health insurance and for health care; measurement and valuation of health; competition in health care delivery. Graduate students with research interests should take ECON 249. Prerequisites: ECON 50 and either ECON 102A or STATS 116 or the equivalent. Recommended: ECON 51.

Effective decision models consider a decision maker's alternatives, information and preferences. The construction of such models in single-party situations with emphasis on the role of information. The course then evolves to two-party decision situations where one party has more information than the other. Models examined include: bidding exercises and the winner's curse, the Akerlof Model and adverse selection, the Principal-Agent model and risk sharing, moral hazard and contract design. Prerequisite: ECON 102A or equivalent. Recommended: Econ 50, Optimization and simulation in Excel.

May be repeated for credit.

Analysis and description of labor markets. Determination of employment, unemployment, hours of work, wages. Welfare programs and work effort. Wage differentials by schooling, experience, gender, and race. Income inequality, changes in inequality, and differences in inequality. Employment contracts, labor unions, and bargaining. International comparisons. Prerequisites: ECON 51, ECON 102B.

This course explores the role of law in promoting economic welfare. Law has many meanings and many aspects, but some version of it is essential to cooperative human interaction and thus to civilization itself. Cooperation often is a positive-sum or welfare-enhancing activity, while competition among individuals, in contrast, is often zero- or negative-sum. Law, among its other functions, can serve as a mechanism to harmonize private incentives to achieve cooperative gains, to maintain an equitable division of those gains, and to deter "cheating." Economic analysis of law focuses on the welfare-enhancing incentive effects of law and law enforcement and on law's role in reducing the risks of cooperation by setting expectations of "what courts or the state will do" in various contingencies. Prerequisite: Econ 50. Undergraduate Public Policy students are required to take this class for a letter grade and enroll in this class for five units.

The interaction between firms and consumers in markets that fall outside the benchmark competitive model. How firms acquire and exploit market power. Game theory and information economics to analyze how firms interact strategically. Topics include monopoly, price discrimination, oligopoly, collusion and cartel behavior, anti-competitive practices, the role of information in markets, anti-trust policy, and e-commerce. Sources include theoretical models, real-world examples, and empirical papers. Prerequisite: ECON 51.

Rigorous introduction to the theory of matching and resource allocation, and its application to practical market design. Theory covers two-sided matching, "house allocation" problems, random assignment, and their variants. Applied topics include school choice, labor market, house allocation, and organ allocation for transplantation. Final paper required.nForms a sequence with ECON 180 and ECON 181, but can be taken independently.nPrerequisites: Experience with abstract mathematics and willingness tonwork hard. No prior knowledge of economics is required, although basic knowledge in game theory is useful.

This is an experiential course that will cover the important concepts that underlying investment theory in Financial Economics. Students will manage an investment portfolio of at least $1 million dollars. In doing so they will learn how risk and return are related in public capital markets. Students are expected to spend a substantial amount of time outside the classroom applying the knowledge they learn in the class. Prerequisites: Econ 51 (or IPS 204A, PublPol 301A), Econ 102B (or Stats 141, Stats 110, CEE 203, Earthsys 160, Educ 200C, Linguist 277, Psych 252), Econ 140 (or Econ 135), Econ 190 (or MS&E 140)

How to read, understand, and use corporate financial statements. Oriented towards the use of financial accounting information (rather than the preparer), and emphasizes the reconstruction of economic events from published accounting reports.

In-depth study of an appropriate question and completion of a thesis of very high quality. Normally written under the direction of a member of the Department of Economics (or some closely related department). See description of honors program. Register for at least 1 unit for at least one quarter after your honors application is approved. Winter registration for one unit under the supervision of the Director of the Honors Program is mandatory for all honors students.

(Non-Economics graduate students register for 202N.) Open to advanced undergraduates with consent of instructors. Theory of the consumer and the implications of constrained maximization; uses of indirect utility and expenditure functions; theory of the producer, profit maximization, and cost minimization; behavior under uncertainty; partial equilibrium analysis and introduction to models of general equilibrium. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: thorough understanding of the elements of multivariate calculus and linear algebra.

Microeconomics I for non-Economics PhD students. Theory of the consumer and the implications of constrained maximization; uses of indirect utility and expenditure functions; theory of the producer, profit maximization, and cost minimization; behavior under uncertainty; partial equilibrium analysis and introduction to models of general equilibrium. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: understanding of the elements of multivariate calculus and linear algebra.

Dynamic economics applied to aggregate economic fluctuations and economic growth. Solving dynamic, stochastic rational expectation models using discrete time and continuous time dynamic programming. Limited enrollment.

This is a two-part course bridging macro and micro development research. The first part focuses on dynamic models of growth and development, with a focus on migration; technological change; the functioning of financial markets; and barriers to agricultural productivity in less developed countries. The second part focuses on non-market and market allocation processes, the institutions that support them, and their role in the development process. Prerequisites: 202 or 202N, 270.

European economic history from middle ages to the twentieth century. Topics: competing hypotheses in explaining long term trends in economic growth and cross-country differences in long-term economic growth; formation, function, and persistence of institutions and organizations; the role of institutions and organizations (e.g. apprenticeship, servitude, partnerships, cooperatives, social networks, share cropping, and communes) as solutions to contractual problems; the economics of migration; the changing economic role of the family. Use of economic theory in guiding hypothesis testing, as well as construction of new datasets and the execution of empirical analysis.

Topics in the theory and empirics of economic growth. For PhD-level students.

This course will cover research topics at the boundary between macroeconomics and finance. Topics may include the study of macroeconomic models with financial frictions, conventional and unconventional monetary policy, its transmission mechanism and the term structure of interest rates, sovereign debt crises, search frictions and segmentation in housing markets, (over)leveraging by households, heterogeneous expectations, excess volatility, financial bubbles and crises. Prerequisites: 210, 211, 212.

May be repeated for credit.

Topics concerning public goods provision, government interventions into private insurance markets, adverse selection, and social insurance design. We also explore questions in the intersection of public and family economics such as the unit of taxation, and the interaction between social insurance and intra-family insurance. Prerequisites: 202, 203, 204, 210, 270, 271, or equivalent with consent of instructor. Recommended: 241.

Topics in current applied microeconomic research including intertemporal labor supply models, public policy, program evaluation, job search, migration, consumption behavior. Student and faculty presentations.

Theoretical and empirical analyses of the determinants of market structure; firm behavior and market efficiency in oligopolies; price discrimination; price dispersion and consumer search; differentiated products; the role of information in markets, including insurance and adverse selection; auctions; collusion and cartel behavior; advertising; entry and market structure; market dynamics; strategic behavior.

Monetary foundations of international exchange; the rules of the game since Bretton Woods. Foreign exchange risk under the world dollar standard. Hedging, forward covering, and interest parity relationships. International capital flows and the current account. Global trade imbalances; China and Japan versus the U.S. Inflation versus exchange rate targeting in developing countries.

Probability, random variables, and distributions; large sample theory; theory of estimation and hypothesis testing. Limited enrollment. Prerequisites: math and probability at the level of Chapter 2, Paul G. Hoel, Introduction to Mathematical Statistics, 5th ed.

Possible topics: parametric asymptotic theory. M and Z estimators. General large sample results for maximum likelihood; nonlinear least squares; and nonlinear instrumental variables estimators including the generalized method of moments estimator under general conditions. Model selection test. Consistent model selection criteria. Nonnested hypothesis testing. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Nonparametric and semiparametric methods. Quantile Regression methods.

This is the first half of a three course sequence (along with Econ 277 & 279) on behavioral and experimental economics. The sequence has two main objectives: 1) examines theories and evidence related to the psychology of economic decision making, 2) Introduces methods of experimental economics, and explores major subject areas (including those not falling within behavioral economics) that have been addressed through laboratory experiments. Focuses on series of experiments that build on one another in an effort to test between competing theoretical frameworks, with the objects of improving the explanatory and predictive performance of standard models, and of providing a foundation for more reliable normative analyses of policy issues. Prerequisites: 204 and 271, or consent of instructor.

This is an introduction to market design, intended mainly for second year PhD students in economics (but also open to other graduates students from around the university and to undergrads who have taken undergrad market design). It will emphasize the combined use of economic theory, experiments and empirical analysis to analyze and engineer market rules and institutions. In this first quarter we will pay particular attention to matching markets, which are those in which price doesn¿t do all of the work, and which include some kind of application or selection process. In recent years market designers have participated in the design and implementation of a number of marketplaces, and the course will emphasize the relation between theory and practice, for example in the design of labor market clearinghouses for American doctors, and school choice programs in a growing number of American cities (including New York and Boston), and the allocation of organs for transplantation. Various forms of market failure will also be discussed.nnAssignment: One final paper. The objective of the final paper is to study an existing market or an environment with a potential role for a market, describe the relevant market design questions, and evaluate how the current market design works and/or propose improvements on the current design.

Aims to provide a solid basis in game-theoretic tools and concepts, both for theorists and for students focusing in other fields. Technical material will include solution concepts and refinements, potential games, supermodular games, repeated games, reputation, and bargaining models. The class will also address some foundational issues, such as epistemic and evolutionary modeling.Prerequisite: 203 or consent of instructor.

Overview of numerical analysis. Computational approaches to solving economic problems, including dynamic programming, projection and perturbation. General equilibrium models, new Keynesian models, Krusell-Smith model, default risk models, international trade models, and dynamic games. Numerical methods for large-scale applications (Smolyak, endogenous-grid, stochastic simulation, epsilon-distinguishable set algorithms). Parallel computation, GPUs and supercomputers. Prerequisite: equivalent of first-year graduate core economics sequence.

Students obtain employment in a relevant research or industrial activity to enhance their professional experience consistent with their degree programs. At the start of the quarter, students must submit a one page statement showing the relevance of the employment to the degree program along with an offer letter. At the end of the quarter, a three page final report must be supplied documenting work done and relevance to degree program. May be repeated for credit.

Restricted to Economics Ph.D. students. Students present current research. May be repeated for credit.

May be repeated for credit.

Field seminar in experimental and behavioral economics.

Issues in measuring and evaluating the economic performance of government tax, expenditure, debt, and regulatory policies; their effects on levels and distribution of income, wealth, and environmental quality; alternative policies and methods of evaluation. Workshop format combines student research, faculty presentations, and guest speakers. Prerequisite: ECON 241 or consent of instructor.

This seminar will examine current research by lawyers and economists on a variety of topics in law and economics. Several sessions of the seminar will consist of an invited speaker, usually from another university, who will discuss his or her current research. Representative of these sessions have been discussions of compensation for government regulations and takings, liability rules for controlling accidents, the definition of markets in antitrust analysis, the role of the government as a controlling shareholder, and optimal drug patent length. Contact the instructor listed for the class to request permission to enroll. Cross-listed with the Law School (Law 7506 and Law 7507).

Current research in the field by visitors, presentations by students, and discussion of recent papers. Students write an original research paper, make a formal presentation, and lead a structured discussion.

Pre-TGR dissertation research.(Staff)