Microeconomics is the study and evaluation of how individuals, firms, and governments make decisions in markets. This course builds a basic framework of how prices convey information in markets, and how governments and policy can shift market behavior, correct market failures, and potentially bring about more socially desirable outcomes.

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 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

The course is an introduction to game theory, for students from different disciplinary backgrounds and interests. Game theory, as a discipline, is barely one hundred years old. From its origins in the analysis of parlor games, it has now become part of real life, including diplomacy and corporate strategy. Its rapid rise to prominence, with implications for various disciplines, from economics and computer science, to politics, philosophy and evolutionary biology has few parallels. This course is designed as a primer for students who have no background in game theory but have an interest in deductive reasoning.

Full details for ECON 2801 - Game Theory: For Economics, Politics, Knowledge and Rationality

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 2850 - 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 - 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 covers methods used by social scientists to identify causal relationships in data, with a focus on evaluating the effects of real-world policies. Many social science analyses--including in the economics fields of public, labor, health, and development-aim to answer these types of policy-related causal questions: What is the effect of having health insurance on someone's health? Does the death penalty reduce crime? Will lowering class sizes increase students' academic achievement? The goal of this course is to train you to become both a high-quality consumer and producer of this type of research. You will learn about several research designs and data analysis methods for identifying causal relationships in data, read and assess empirical papers that apply these methods, and apply these methods to datasets yourself.

Full details for ECON 3171 - Causal Inference and Data Analysis for Public Policy

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

This course surveys topics in crime and crime prevention, with a focus on thinking critically about empirical evidence. The first part of the course briefly introduces an economic model of crime and reviews relevant empirical methods. The remainder of the course is spent discussing a range of crime-related topics, including policing, incarceration, employment, drugs & alcohol, firearms, education, and health. Students will consider trade-offs to different crime prevention policies and gain experience framing and summarizing evidence for policymakers.

Full details for ECON 3255 - Economics of Crime

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

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

Uses the tools of labor and public economics to analyze modern welfare states. What are the rationales for the level of government intervention in these states, and how do these rationales square with notions of market failure? What are the economic costs and benefits of taxes, transfers, and regulations in these states? Can voting models explain the growth and operation of welfare states? What are the impacts of these policies on labor markets? Possible answers to these questions are discussed.

Full details for ECON 3450 - Economic Analysis of the Welfare State

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

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. (HCP-EL)

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

The course will focus on how legal rules and regulations impact consumers in the marketplace. A significant portion of this course will focus on how developments in tort law, contract law, property law, and regulatory law influence social welfare and serve to protect consumers in their interactions with the marketplace. The course will also focus on how the federal regulatory agencies function and analyze the effectiveness of these agencies in protecting consumers. The course will focus specifically on the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission. In addition to students interested in public policy and economics, the course can be helpful to students who are interested in attending law school as students will get exposed to many of the concepts they will address in a first year law school curriculum.

Full details for ECON 3830 - Economics of Consumer Protection and the Law

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

This class will focus on the role of the environment in the theory and practice of economics. It will make use of microeconomic analysis at the intermediate level and will incorporate real-world examples. It examines market failure, externalities, benefit-cost analysis, nonmarket valuation techniques, and cost-effective policy instruments.

Full details for ECON 3865 - Environmental Economics

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

The course will cover the determinants of employment and wages, with a focus on income inequality. We will cover labor demand, labor supply, human capital, compensating differentials, imperfect competition, discrimination, top incomes, and the labor market’s role in business cycles. The course will focus on labor market models with empirical applications and application to current events.

Full details for ECON 4400 - Labor Economics

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

Behavioral economics starts by developing models of decision making and investigating the implications of those models for individuals and household outcomes (which is the focus of ECON 4660). This course will focus on the next step: What are the implications of those models for market outcomes and for the role of government interventions to improve market outcomes? We will study applications from industrial organization and health economics, and applications from the new subfield of behavioral public economics that studies how to think about government policy when individuals and households may not be behaving as economists typically assume.

Full details for ECON 4670 - Applications of 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. (MPA-DA, MPA-DATSCI)

Full details for ECON 6590 - Empirical Strategies for Policy Analysis

Independent study.

Full details for ECON 6990 - Readings in Economics

Full details for ECON 7190 - Advanced Topics in Econometrics I

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 focuses on ?rm dynamics, causes of size and productivity differences as well as patterns of growth, entry, and exit over the life cycle. It also studies how ?rms interact through production networks, the economic forces that shape these relationships, and the consequences for aggregate outcomes.

Full details for ECON 7325 - Firm Dynamics and Aggregate Productivity

Many economic decisions have to be made in settings in which many interacting agents have imperfect and diverse information about pay-off relevant variables. This course gives an overview of existing research in macroeconomics and finance that deviates from settings with perfectly informed rational agents. The course will cover both methodological and substantial aspects of the existing literature.

Full details for ECON 7335 - Introduction to Information Economics

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

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the core theoretical models and empirical methods of industrial organization. The course is designed to equip students with tools for structural empirical research on questions both within and outside of industrial organization. Theoretical topics include monopoly pricing, dynamic competition, and entry games. Empirical methods covered include demand estimation and estimation of dynamic discrete choice models.

Full details for ECON 7510 - Industrial Organization and Structural Methods

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 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

The Law, Economics, and Policy seminar is a speaker hosted in the Brooks School of Public Policy. Outside (and sometimes internal) speakers give talks on a variety of topics relevant to advanced research in law, economics, and/or policy topics. This series provides graduate students with exposure to high-quality research, strengthens their skills in interpreting economics and policy research, and allows them networking opportunities with the external speakers.

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