Results for MGTECON

This course gives students the background they need to understand the broad movements in the global economy. Key topics include long-run economic growth, technological change, wage inequality, international trade, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, and monetary policy. By the end of the course, students should be able to read and understand the discussions of economic issues in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Congressional Budget Office.

This class will analyze the growth in inequality in the US over the last several decades and how that trend is likely to continue or change in the future. We will ask if and how public policy can affect inequality. We will also focus on business's role -- what are the responsibilities of private sector companies, how does inequality affect them, and how should the growth in inequality affect their strategies? We will look at inequality in income, some of its potential sources, and its effects in other areas. Specifically, we will look at education, housing, the social safety net, migration, and the job market. The class will be very interactive and will be based on readings drawn from academic research, case studies, news, and opinion readings. We will also have guest speakers from industry, government, and non-profits. The class will be co-taught by a GSB labor economist and an advisor to policy makers with decades of business experience.nnLOGISTICAL NOTE: The class will not meet on May 23 or May 25. Instead, there will be a mandatory, all-day class field trip to explore inequality issues in depth and in person on Wednesday, May 24. If you have an academic-related reason you cannot make the trip, we will assign alternative work. However, the trip is required unless you have a conflicting class or academic obligation.

Economic issues permeate all that happens in government. This topics-based course will exam a variety of historic and current issues on the political agenda where economics is central to decision making. It is taught by faculty who served at the White House in either the Clinton or George W. Bush Administration.

This class will provide students practical skills for measuring impact in business and social enterprise, with a principal focus on evaluating, conducting, and analyzing experiments and quasi-experiments. How large is the impact of raising prices on sales? Is an advertising campaign working? Does a non-profit actually improve people's lives? Students will finish the course with the ability to design, analyze, and skeptically evaluate experiments that can rigorously answer questions like these. Students will learn: how to evaluate claims of causality; how to conduct and analyze experiments and quasi-experiments; the advantages and disadvantages of experiments; how to quantify uncertainty; and what can go wrong in experiments. Students will acquire a conceptual understanding of basic experimental statistics to inform these skills. Students will also be exposed to how leading companies, researchers, and social innovators strategically deploy experiments. Finally, students will conduct their own experiments on a topic of their choosing in small groups. The class will not assume any prior statistical or mathematical training. Completing short problem sets will require acquiring basic knowledge of R.

This is a short course on data driven decision making. The purpose of the course is to help students become intelligent consumers and producers of data analytics in the business context. Each class meeting will consider a different case/caselet involving data and statistical analyses. We will spend a lot of time on understanding the difference between correlation and causation, and measurement issues such as small sample problems and selection bias. By the end of the course students will have sharpened analytical skills, and will be more critical of data and statistical analyses. This is *not* a data/statistical methods course, but is rather an analysis course. The course requires only the tools learned in D&D.

This course gives students a background to understand fundamental issues in international macroeconomics and finance. Key topics include international asset pricing, hedging exchange rate risk, the relation between interest rates and exchange rates, business cycle fluctuations in emerging markets as well as in developed countries, banking and currency crises. By the end of the course, students should be able to read and understand the discussions of these topics in a publication such as The Economist. Each week we will have one lecture on fundamental concepts and one that applies these to recent events.

This course covers auction theory, matching, and related parts of the literature on bargaining and pricing. Key papers in the early part of the course are Myerson and Satterthwaite on bargaining, Myerson on optimal auctions, and Milgrom and Weber's classic work. We then turn to markets in which complicated preferences and constraints, limitations on the use of cash, or variations in contract details among bidders play an important role. Emphasis is on matching markets such as the National Resident Matching Program and asset auctions such as the spectrum auctions.

This course completes the first-year sequence in econometrics. It develops nonparametric, semiparametric and nonlinear parametric models in detail, as well as optimization methods used to estimate nonlinear models. The instructor will discuss identification issues, the statistical properties of these estimators, and how they are used in practice. Depending on student and instructor interest, we will consider advanced topics and applications, including: simulation methods and Bayesian estimators.

Students and faculty review and present recent research papers on basic theories and economic applications of decision theory, game theory and mechanism design. Applications include market design and analyses of incentives and strategic behavior in markets, and selected topics such as auctions, bargaining, contracting, signaling, and computation.

The course covers various topics relating to social insurance. The first half of the course covers the rationale for government interventions into private insurance markets, adverse selection, social insurance design and the intersection between social insurance and intra-family insurance. The second half of the course covers local public policy through the lens of social insurance, and includes topics such as spatial equilibrium, placed-based policies and housing policy.

This course meets weekly on Tuesdays at Noon. The primary purpose of the course is to read and discuss current working papers in Industrial Organization and related fields (e.g., Econometrics, Marketing, and Labor). Students are required to present papers once per quarter and both students and faculty may also present their own working papers.

This course will cover statistical methods based on the machine learning literature that can be used for causal inference. In economics and the social sciences more broadly, empirical analyses typically estimate the effects of counterfactual policies, such as the effect of implementing a government policy, changing a price, showing advertisements, or introducing new products. Recent advances in supervised and unsupervised machine learning provide systematic approaches to model selection and prediction, methods that are particularly well suited to datasets with many observations and/or many covariates. This course will review when and how machine learning methods can be used for causal inference, and it will also review recent modifications and extensions to standard methods to adapt them to causal inference and provide statistical theory for hypothesis testing. Applications to the evaluation of large-scale experiments, including online A/B tests and experiments on networks, will receive special attention. We will also consider topic modeling, Bayesian methods, and a brief overview of textual analysis.

This seminar will examine applications of labor economics to business issues and firms' practices. Material will include both theoretical and empirical work, and the syllabus will range from classics in Personnel Economics to current (unpublished) research. Some of the topics to be covered include, but are not limited to, compensation practices, assignment of decision rights, organizational structure, attracting, retaining, and displacing employees, and workplace practices (such as team-based organization, profit sharing, etc.)

This course is offered for students requiring specialized training in an area not covered by existing courses. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the reading.

This course is elected as soon as a student is ready to begin research for the dissertation, usually shortly after admission to candidacy. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the research.

Doctoral Practicum in Teaching

Doctoral Practicum in Research