Courses

Reviews lecture material presented in ECON 1110 lectures; provides problem-solving techniques, study tips, and additional problems to prepare for exams and problem sets; provides additional time for questions and discussion of concepts. Provides additional instruction for students who need reinforcement.

Full details for ECON 1001 - Principles of Micro-Economics Supplement

Reviews lecture material presented in ECON 1120 lectures; provides problem-solving techniques, study tips, and additional problems to prepare for exams and problem sets; provides additional time for questions and discussion of concepts. Provides additional instruction for students who need reinforcement.

Full details for ECON 1002 - Principles of Macro-Economics Supplement

Explanation and evaluation of how the price system operates in determining what goods are produced, how goods are produced, who receives income, and how the price system is modified and influenced by private organizations and government policy.

Full details for ECON 1110 - Introductory Microeconomics

Analysis of aggregate economic activity in relation to the level, stability, and growth of national income. Topics may include the determination and effects of unemployment, inflation, balance of payments, deficits, and economic development, and how these may be influenced by monetary, fiscal, and other policies.

Full details for ECON 1120 - Introductory Macroeconomics

This interdisciplinary course examines network structures and how they matter in everyday life. The course examines how each of the computing, economic, sociological and natural worlds are connected and how the structure of these connections affects each of these worlds. Tools of graph theory and game theory are taught and then used to analyze networks. Topics covered include the web, the small world phenomenon, markets, neural networks, contagion, search and the evolution of networks.

Full details for ECON 2040 - Networks

The pricing processes in a private enterprise economy are analyzed under varying competitive conditions, and their role in the allocation of resources and the functional distribution of national income is considered.

Full details for ECON 3030 - Intermediate Microeconomic Theory

Introduces the theory of national income and determination and economic growth in alternative models of the national economy. Examines the interaction and relation of these models to empirical aggregate economic data. Reviews national accounts, output and employment determination, price stability and economic growth, in the context of alternative government policy programs and the impact of globalization.

Full details for ECON 3040 - Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory

This course provides an introduction to probability and parametric inference. Topics include: random variables, standard distributions, the law of large numbers, the central limit theorem, likelihood-based estimation, sampling distributions and hypothesis testing.

Full details for ECON 3110 - Probability Models and Inference for the Social Sciences

Introduction to the theory and application of econometric techniques. Emphasis is on both development of techniques and applications of econometrics to economic questions. Topics include estimation and inference in bivariate and multiple regression models, instrumental variables, regression with qualitative information, heteroskedasticity, and serial correlation. Students are expected to apply techniques through regular empirical exercises with economic data.

Full details for ECON 3120 - Applied Econometrics

Provides an introduction to statistical inference and to principles of probability. It includes descriptive statistics, principles of probability, discrete and continuous distributions, and hypothesis testing (of sample means, proportions, variance). Regression analysis and correlation are introduced.

Full details for ECON 3130 - Statistics and Probability

Examines the causes and consequences of sustained economic growth, and the development of economics as a discipline, from pre-industrial mercantilist thought through the economics of John Maynard Keynes. Stresses the relationship between the consequences of 19th-century economic growth and the evolution of economic thought.

Full details for ECON 3300 - Development of Economic Thought and Institutions

Surveys problems in American economic history from the first settlements to early industrialization.

Full details for ECON 3310 - American Economic History I

Examines the development of the Chinese economy and the evolution of China's economic system between the early 1950s and late 1990s.

Full details for ECON 3380 - China's Economy Under Mao and Deng

Seeks to illustrate the complexity of decision making in a nonprofit organization and to show how microeconomic analysis in general, and labor-market analysis in particular, can usefully be applied to analyze resource allocation decisions at universities. Topics include financial aid, tuition, admissions policies, endowment policies, faculty salary determination, the tenure system, mandatory retirement policies, merit pay, affirmative action, comparable worth, collective bargaining, resource allocation across and within departments, undergraduate versus graduate education, research costs, libraries, athletics, and "socially responsible" policies. Lectures and discussions of the extensive readings are supplemented by presentations by Cornell administrators and outside speakers who have been engaged in university resource-allocation decisions or have done research on the subject.

Full details for ECON 3410 - Economic Analysis of the University

Examines the changing economic roles of women and men in the labor market and in the family. Topics include a historical overview of changing gender roles, the determinants of the gender division of labor in the family, trends in female and male labor-force participation, gender differences in occupations and earnings, the consequences of women's employment for the family, and a consideration of women's status in other countries.

Full details for ECON 3440 - Women in the Economy

Surveys economic and industrial issues in the sports industry. Topics include salary determination, including free agency, salary caps, salary arbitration; competitive balance and financial health of sports leagues; antitrust issues in sports; labor disputes, union history, and contract administration issues in sports leagues; discrimination in sports; and performance incentives.

Full details for ECON 3460 - The Economics of Collective Bargaining in Sports

This course will examine the determinants of international capital flows and their consequences for growth and volatility. Basic analytical models in international finance, including those related to exchange rate dynamics, will be covered. Emerging market perspectives on these issues will be emphasized, with a particular focus on the economies of China, and India. The course will analyze the challenges created by rising global financial integration for monetary policy, financial regulation and other policies. Students will be required to write an independent research paper.

Full details for ECON 3545 - International Finance and Macroeconomics

Standard economic theory assumes that individuals are rational decision-makers; however, that is often not the case in the real world. Behavioral economics uses findings from psychology to determine ways in which individuals are systematically irrational to improve upon existing models. The first part of this course reviews these theories, while the second part of the course focuses on how these findings have been used to design better education, health, and tax policies as well as many others.

Full details for ECON 3670 - Behavioral Economics and Public Policy

Risky health behaviors such as cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol, risky sex, drug use, and poor diet and physical inactivity (leading to obesity) are responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and impose billions of dollars in medical care costs each year in the United States.  This course teaches the economic approach to studying risky health behaviors.  The research literature on the economic causes and correlates of risky health behaviors will be studied in detail.  Numerous policies to modify risky health behaviors, such as the minimum legal drinking age and recreational marijuana use laws, will be debated in class.  Students will use the statistical software package STATA to analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health) in order to answer research questions relating to risky behaviors. 

Full details for ECON 3710 - The Economics of Risky Health Behaviors

This course has two objectives: 1) To explore how Economics can be used to understand global health, and 2) to provide tools and skills for understating global health policy. I emphasize economic models, scientific understating of diseases and the use of quantitative tools for the assessment of global health issues.

Full details for ECON 3740 - Global Health Economics and Policy

Examines, through the lens of economic analysis, legal principles drawn from various branches of law, including contracts, torts, and property. Cases are assigned for class discussion; in addition, there are exams and writing assignments. 

Full details for ECON 3800 - Economics and the Law

A modicum of game-theoretic knowledge is essential in today's age of complex diplomacy and corporate strategizing. This introductory course is meant to familiarize students with the basic principles of game theory and rational choice in strategic environments. Important ideas and concepts, with real-life illustrations, will be discussed. The course is designed for students with an interest in economics, political strategy, policymaking, and the social sciences, in general.

Full details for ECON 3801 - Introduction to Game Theory and Strategic Thinking

Course focuses on global health challenges, and how they are related to poverty and inequality.

Full details for ECON 3910 - Health, Poverty, and Inequality: A Global Perspective

Focuses on the unique features of agricultural commodity markets. Emphasizes government and private institutions that affect these markets, as well as on models of price behavior including marketing margins and imperfect competition. Also covers empirical tools to evaluate market characteristics.

Full details for ECON 3920 - Analysis of Agricultural Markets

Examines the theory and decision making in the presence of uncertainty and the practical aspects of particular asset markets.

Full details for ECON 4220 - Financial Economics

Analyzes the role of government in a free market economy. Topics include public goods, market failures, allocation mechanisms, optimal taxation, effects of taxation, and benefit-cost analysis. Current topics of an applied nature vary from semester to semester.

Full details for ECON 4260 - Public Finance: The Microeconomics of Government

Surveys the sources of comparative advantage. Studies commercial policy and analyzes the welfare economics of trade between countries. Some attention is paid to the institutional aspects of the world trading system.

Full details for ECON 4510 - International Trade Theory and Policy

Studies the theory of production economics with emphasis on applications to agriculture and natural resources. Topics include the derivation, estimation, and use of production, cost, profit, revenue, demand, and supply functions. Discusses the concepts of efficiency and productivity. Introduces production response over time and under risk.

Full details for ECON 4830 - Production Economics

Covers bank management and supervision, with special reference to international supervisory agreements (Basel II) and U.S. Federal guidance. Sources of risk are considered-market, credit, operational, and others. Quantitative methods for modeling and measuring risk are covered.

Full details for ECON 4902 - Banks

The course will appeal to students who have strong quantitative skills and would like to see applications of economic theory to analyze issues prominent in major public debates. Currently, we offer a very limited number of advanced courses that require students to do independent research, discuss their ideas in teams, present their work, and write a research proposal.

Full details for ECON 4903 - Quantitative Analysis of Economic Data

Financial Fragility and the Macro-economy. Topics will include the history and theory of bank runs and other panics, the recent financial meltdown, bubbles, moral hazard, irrational exuberance, rational exuberance, excess volatility, and sunspot equilibrium. Comfort with calculus is necessary.

Full details for ECON 4905 - Financial Fragility and the Macroeconomy

Industrial organization economists study firm behavior in imperfectly competitive markets, which are far more common than the perfectly competitive markets that were the focus of your introductory microeconomics course.  Econ 4906 analyzes the acquisition and use of market power by firms, strategic interactions among firms, and the role of government competition policy.  We will approach this subject from both theoretical and applied perspectives.

Full details for ECON 4906 - Industrial Organization and Competitive Strategy

This course provides an introduction to the economics of asymmetric information, contracts and mechanism design. Topics covered include: bilateral contracting problems with moral hazard and/or adverse selection, bargaining with asymmetric information, the design of optimal auctions and other multilateral mechanisms, signaling and incomplete contacts. Prerequisites include intermediate microeconomics and statistics. The student is expected to be comfortable with basic probability (random variables, expectation, independence, and conditional probability) and calculus.

Full details for ECON 4907 - The Economics of Asymmetric Information and Contracts

Students should consult the director of undergraduate studies for details. Admission is competitive. Interested students should apply to the program in the spring semester of their junior year.

Full details for ECON 4990 - Honors Program

Full details for ECON 4998 - Cross-Cultural Work Experiences

Independent study.

Full details for ECON 4999 - Independent Study in Economics

Topics in consumer and producer theory.

Full details for ECON 6090 - Microeconomic Theory I

Covers the following topics: static general equilibrium; intertemporal general equilibrium: infinitely lived agents models and overlapping generations models; welfare theorems; equivalence between sequential markets and Arrow-Debreu Markets; Ricardian proposition; Modigliani-Miller theorem; asset pricing; recursive competitive equilibrium; the Neoclassical Growth Model; calibration; and introduction to dynamic programming.

Full details for ECON 6130 - Macroeconomics I

Covers selected topics in matrix algebra (vector spaces, matrices, simultaneous linear equations, characteristic value problem), calculus of several variables (elementary real analysis, partial differentiation) convex analysis (convex sets, concave functions, quasi-concave functions), classical optimization theory (unconstrained maximization, constrained maximization), Kuhn-Tucker optimization theory (concave programming, quasi-concave programming).

Full details for ECON 6170 - Intermediate Mathematical Economics I

Gives the probabilistic and statistical background for meaningful application of econometric techniques. Topics include probability theory probability spaces, random variables, distributions, moments, transformations, conditional distributions, distribution theory and the multivariate normal distribution, convergence concepts, laws of large numbers, central limit theorems, Monte Carlo simulation; statistics: sample statistics, sufficiency, exponential families of distributions. Further topics in statistics are considered in ECON 6200.

Full details for ECON 6190 - Econometrics I

Focuses on empirical strategies to identify the causal effects of public policies and programs. The course uses problem sets based on real-world examples and data to examine techniques for analyzing nonexperimental data including control function approaches, matching methods, panel-data methods, selection models, instrumental variables, and regression-discontinuity methods. The emphasis throughout, however, is on the critical role of research design in facilitating credible causal inference. The course aids students in both learning to implement a variety of statistical tools using large data sets, and in learning to select which tools are best suited to a given research project.

Full details for ECON 6590 - Empirical Strategies for Policy Analysis

Social science research almost always combines empirical observation (data), the construction of concepts (language), and the logical analysis of the relations between observations and concepts (statistics).  This course examines the relations between these three dimensions as the analyst moves from one to the other both as practice and in the crafting of a formal summary of findings and argument. We will be particularly interested in the foundational assumptions that underpin the connections between empirical reality, language, and statistical analysis. While these foundational assumptions are often taken for granted by social scientists, they vary dramatically between social science disciplines.  The implicit contradiction between that variance and their doxic acceptance within disciplines will be a primary focus of the course.

Full details for ECON 6910 - Foundations of the Social Sciences

An overview of the models and methods for analyzing data with cross-sectional dependence, i.e., those able to explicitly test behavioral models with interdependent agents' decisions. The technicalities are presented in a basic formulation, favoring the transmission of ideas, intuitions, and stressing the links with underlying behavioral mechanisms essential to guiding the interpretation of the results. The open questions in the economics literature are emphasized. They include: 1) the definition of the reference group; 2) the possible presence of unobserved attributes that may generate a problem of confounding variables (spurious spatial correlation); and 3) simultaneity in agents' behavior that may hinder identification of exogenous effects, i.e., influence of agents' attributes) from endogenous effects, i.e., influence of agents' outcomes. This short course focuses on identification issues.

Full details for ECON 7260 - Econometrics of Network Analysis

Covers advanced topics in monetary economics, macroeconomics, and economic growth-such as economic volatility, the "burden" of government debt, restrictions on government borrowing, dynamic optimization, endogenous growth theory, technological evolution, financial market frictions, and cyclical fluctuations.

Full details for ECON 7320 - Monetary Economics II

This course provides an introduction to the field of public economics.  The field is large, with significant theoretical and empirical components.  The emphasis of this course is on the theory.  It covers core ideas in the area of static and dynamic optimal taxation, public goods and externalities, social insurance and welfare, and state and local public finance.

Full details for ECON 7360 - Public Finance

Focused on analytical models of political institutions, this course is organized around canonical models and their applications. These include voting models, menu auctions, models of reputation, and cheap talk games. These models are used to explain patterns of participation in elections, institutions of congress, lobbying, payments to special interest groups and other observed phenomena.

Full details for ECON 7385 - Economics and Politics

Includes reading and discussion of selected topics in labor economics. Stresses applications of economic theory and econometrics to the labor market and human resource areas.

Full details for ECON 7420 - Seminar in Labor Economics I

The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with canonical models of search and study their application in macroeconomics and labor economics. Our primary objective will be to study the most relevant frameworks for reading papers in the field - e.g., random search, directed search, wage posting, and island models. Particular emphasis will be placed on the application and quantitative evaluation of these frameworks.  Our secondary objective will be to study new papers and topics at the research frontier.

Full details for ECON 7440 - Macro Labor

Considers methods for the analysis of longitudinal data, that is, data in which a set of individual units are followed over time. Focuses on both estimation and specification testing of these models. Students consider how these statistical models are linked to underlying theories in the social sciences. Course coverage includes panel data methods (e.g., fixed, random, mixed effects models), factor analysis, measurement error models, and general moment structure methods. The two courses ILRLE 7410/ILRLE 7420 are designed to be a one-year sequence. The expectation is that students will continue from the first course into the second course. Students should not expect to be able to take the second course without having done the first course.

Full details for ECON 7480 - Applied Econometrics I

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to theoretical models in industrial organization. It is designed to prepare researchers to identify interesting questions and rigorously motivate empirical work. Topics include supermodular games, collusion, bargaining, auctions, industry dynamics, and productivity.

Full details for ECON 7510 - Industrial Organization and Regulation I

Graduate students and the instructor present draft research proposals, papers, and preliminary thesis results for group review and discussion. Students who actively participate by offering written and oral comments on others' work receive 1 credit. Students who also present their own proposal or paper receive 2 credits. Presentations last 75 minutes and thus represent a substantial investment of time. Students who present a second proposal or paper receive 3 credits.

Full details for ECON 7650 - Development Microeconomics Graduate Research Seminar

This course will provide a selective overview of topics at the cutting-edge of academic research and policy debates about the international financial system. Main areas will include the effects of financial globalization on growth, volatility, and the transmission of business cycles. The course will also examine the determinants of the direction and composition of capital flows. It will then cover the causes and effects of the financial crisis and what implications it has for the research agenda in international finance and macroeconomics, with particular emphasis on the implications for monetary policy and financial regulation. This course is intended for advanced Ph.D. students, especially those in search of thesis topics, and will require extensive student involvement in preparing research proposals and critiques of existing literature. Students will develop their own research ideas during the course and are required to write a substantive research paper.

Full details for ECON 7670 - Topics in International Finance

This new course will introduce graduate students to the main concepts and ideas of law and economics, founded on simple game theory. It will begin with an introduction to mainstream law and economics and then move on to explore new approaches and ideas. These will then be applied to contemporary policy concerns, such as promoting development, designing welfare interventions, controlling corruption and financial fraud, such as Ponzis, and analyzing antitrust law and labor regulation. The defining feature of the course will be the development of these topics within a common conceptual framework that is based on game theory. It will train students to develop these ideas further and create research programs. A detailed reading list will be announced at the start of the semester but one book that will be used extensively is my forthcoming book The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics, Princeton University Press, June 2018.  

Full details for ECON 7740 - Law and Economics, and Games

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7841 - Econometrics Workshop

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7842 - Microeconomic Theory Workshop

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7843 - Industrial Organization Workshop

Presentations of completed papers and work in progress by faculty members, advanced graduate students, and speakers from other universities. Focuses on the formulation, design, and execution of dissertations.

Full details for ECON 7845 - Workshop in Labor Economics

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7846 - S.C. Tsiang Macroeconomics Workshop

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7847 - Development Workshop

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7848 - Public Economics Workshop

Research workshop featuring guest lecturers.

Full details for ECON 7849 - Behavioral Economics Workshop

Ph.D. students in the Field of Economics are required to take this year-long research seminar, and receive a grade of Satisfactory, in order to remain in good standing in the Ph.D. program. Students present and discuss each second-year paper, which must be completed before the semester opens and Economics 7850 meets for the first time. Students also present at least two additional papers or paper plans. These are intended to be part of the core of the student's thesis proposal, which must be given as part of the student's A Exam prior to the start of the fourth year of graduate study in the economics Ph.D. program. Economics 7851 ends with a mini-conference, attended by faculty and other Ph.D. students, in which each student makes a formal presentation in standard economics conference format, and each student discusses one of these presentations. Professional writing and presentation coaching is also provided.

Full details for ECON 7850 - Third Year Research Seminar