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

This course teaches students what they need to know in order to be excellent course assistants (CA's) in economics courses at Cornell. We will meet for an hour each week to talk about how students learn economics, and how best to help them learn. Students in this course will get concrete guidance on what to do as a CA, and we'll discuss the research behind this guidance. Students will be expected to do some reading outside class and either write a research paper on economic education or develop new teaching materials that can be incorporated into an economics course. Students will also facilitate small group activities in lecture courses (3 hours per week) and help other students in the Economics Support Center (2 hours per week).

Full details for ECON 2100 - Teaching and Learning Economics

Full details for ECON 2475 - Visualizing Economics: Introducing Basic Economic Concepts with Visual Arts

The course is an introduction to game theory for students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and interests. Game theory is a discipline barely one hundred years old. Its rise to prominence, with implications for various subjects, from economics, politics, and philosophy, to finance, diplomacy and computer science, in such a short time, has few parallels. The course is meant to be a primer on the subject for students who have no background in it. It can serve as groundwork for students pursuing different disciplines and also for those who intend to later take more advanced courses in game theory.

Full details for ECON 2801 - Game Theory: For Finance, Diplomacy and Everyday Life

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 - Applied Probability and Statistics

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 - Probability and Statistics

This course provides an overview of the major programs that make up the social safety net in the United States. We will review the economic rationale behind social programs, identify the economic consequences of these programs, and assess the empirical research on these topics. A major emphasis of the course will be on understanding the strengths and limitations of the core methodologies used in the existing economics literature.

Full details for ECON 3250 - Economics of the U.S. Social Safety Net

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

Full details for ECON 3440 - Women in the Economy

This course will provide an overview of new financial technologies (Fintech), cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies, and decentralized finance (DeFi). The implications of these novel technologies for the future of financial markets, central banking, and international finance will be examined. The course will also cover basic analytical models in open economy macroeconomics and international finance, focusing on capital flows and exchange rate dynamics.

Full details for ECON 3545 - Money and Finance in the Digital Age

Familiarizes students with the economic analysis of consumer policy issues. Uses the tools of microeconomic analysis to investigate the interaction between government and the marketplace, with an emphasis on how that interaction affects consumers. Examines the rationale for and effects of regulation of industry. Considers alternative theories of regulation, including the capture, economic, and public interest theories. Applies those theories to specific types of regulation, including economic regulation of specific industries (e.g., telecommunications, electricity, trucking, railroads, postal services) as well as to broader social regulation (e.g., health, safety, environmental). The effects of regulatory reform in numerous industries are also examined. An attempt is made to examine current topics relating to consumer policy.

Full details for ECON 3610 - The Economics of Consumer Policy

This course will review and enhance existing knowledge of health care delivery and related policy issues, using the lens and tools of microeconomics. The topics covered will span consumer behavior, sources and markets for health insurance, provider markets, provider incentives and regulation, as well as market consolidation across a variety of key industries (e.g., physicians, hospitals, and post-acute care providers). Importantly, a key differentiator as well as pedagogical feature of the course will be extensive exposure to classic and contemporary empirical (i.e., data-driven) research tied to these topics. This aspect allows students to be aware of and accumulate knowledge from the frontier of what is scientifically known about key and salient health economics and health policy topics. The selected academic studies incorporated into each lecture will reinforce the core economic theories and insights accompanying a given topic and demonstrate how existing theories can be formally tested as well as refined or expanded using strong empirical research designs. This course should be highly relevant to students planning to work for or with healthcare-focused companies as well as those wishing to pursue master’s (e.g., MBA, MHA, MPH) or doctoral level academic programs (e.g., JD, MD, PharmD, or PhD) tied to healthcare.

Full details for ECON 3720 - The Economics of Health Care Markets

This course will examine issues that arise when a country attempts to implement and maintain a competition policy as a way of promoting economic growth and efficiency. The basic reading material will start with actual cases (most of them arising under U.S. antitrust law), and use those cases to probe the legal, economic and broad policy issues that the cases raise.

Full details for ECON 3805 - Competition Law and Policy

Introduction to the use of economics as a tool in forming and evaluating environmental policy, with a focus on how economists measure effects of environmental quality and regulation. Topics include: externalities in an environmental context; regulation methods such as command and control, Pigouvian taxation, and cap and trade; methods for measuring the costs and benefits of environmental policy; overview of current environmental legislation; environmental quality and health; regulation and environmental justice.

Full details for ECON 3850 - Economics and Environmental Policy

This course introduces the concepts and methods used by economists to study not only cities, regions and their relationships with each other, but, more generally, the spatial aspects and outcomes of decision-making by households and firms. Areas examined include determinants of urban growth and decline, land and housing markets, transportation issues, segregation and poverty, and the allocation and distribution of urban public services.

Full details for ECON 3855 - Urban Economics

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

Introduces fundamental frameworks for program evaluation and causal inference in empirical research and the industry, and studies how modern predictive machine learning methods can be applied to get more credible estimates of causal effects. Problems are formulated and discussed in terms of formal econometric models, but the focus will be the applied and practical perspectives, especially in economics. Requires statistic and econometric knowledge at the level of ECON 3140 or equivalent, and programing experience in R or Python.

Full details for ECON 4140 - Methods and Computation in Program Evaluation

This is an advanced course intended for upper level economics undergraduates who enjoy learning about and analyzing economic models. The course provides an introduction to the economic analysis of politics. Part I discusses collective choice and introduces some core ideas from social choice theory. Part II provides an overview of economic theories of political behavior. Part III discusses how political decisions are distorted away from those that would be made by the benevolent governments from public economics textbooks. Part IV offers economic perspectives on a number of contemporary issues in American politics.

Full details for ECON 4290 - Economic Analysis of Politics

In this course we will study two major features of modern economies. The first is the large dispersion across households in income and wealth, the second is the existence of persistent unemployment. We will be interested in understanding the models and tools that economists have developed to represent these phenomena, as well as in using these models to analyze the welfare implications of various government interventions. Topics to be covered include: Dynamic programming. Solution Methods of General Equilibrium models. Heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models. Search, matching and equilibrium unemployment.

Full details for ECON 4410 - Quantitative Models for the Labor Market

This course introduces students to behavioral economics, a subfield of economics that incorporates insights from psychology and other social sciences into economics. The course reviews some of the standard assumptions made in economics, and examines evidence on how human behavior systematically departs from these assumptions. The course then investigates alternative models of human decision making, and assesses to what extent these alternative models help improve economic analyses.

Full details for ECON 4660 - Behavioral Economics

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

This independent study course offers economics majors (i.e., undergraduates whose applications to affiliate with the economics major have been approved) an opportunity to reflect on concepts from economics as they were encountered and applied in a recent internship. Students write a short paper describing their work experience and how it connects to the educational objectives of the economics major.

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

Independent study.

Full details for ECON 6990 - Readings in Economics

Full details for ECON 7115 - Job Search Models

This course is an advanced course in International Trade, targeted at second year PhD students. It covers theoretical models of international trade and economic geography, the gravity-type structure of trade through a variety of micro-foundations, and techniques to estimate trade models and assess counterfactuals. The course will also touch on global value chains, multinational productions, international diffusion of ideas, migration, and the consequences of trade for inequality.

Full details for ECON 7150 - International Trade

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

This course explores how production networks shape macroeconomic outcomes. We develop models in which firms interact through input-output linkages and examine how shocks propagate along supply chains. We also study how networks are formed, and how the impact of taxes and other distortions can be affected by the structure of the production network.

Full details for ECON 7265 - Production Networks

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 Structural Methods

This course provides an overview of the field of behavioral economics. The course reviews evidence on how human behavior systematically departs from the standard assumptions of economics, and discusses how one might formally model alternative assumptions based on this evidence. The course then examines attempts to empirically test these theories. The goal is not merely to point out problems with traditional economic assumptions, rather, it is to develop alternative assumptions and to investigate whether these alternative assumptions can be usefully incorporated into mainstream economics.

Full details for ECON 7580 - Behavioral Economics I

This course introduces students to the key theories, canonical papers, and current frontiers in the microeconomics of international development. We cover topics related to agricultural household models, consumption smoothing, labor markets, trade and search, relational contracts, and public finance. Paired with AEM 7621 to form a graduate sequence in development economics.

Full details for ECON 7660 - Microeconomics of International Development

Advanced seminar explores recent empirical research and evaluation literature on issues of health, nutrition, education and intrahousehold decision-making in developing countries.

Full details for ECON 7711 - Microeconomics of Development: Applications to Health, Nutrition and Education

The purpose of this course is to familiarize you with basic models and empirical regularities in the area of macro-development. That is, the use of structural models and micro data to answer policy relevant questions related to the process of economic development and with focus on developing countries.

Full details for ECON 7745 - Topics in Macro Development

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

Research workshop featuring guests lecturers. 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

Research workshop for members of the economics graduate field; featuring guest speakers.

Full details for ECON 7854 - Law, Economics and Policy Seminar