Economics

The goal of this course is to familiarize you with the economy and microeconomic reasoning, and it has been designed both for students who will go on to major in economics and those who will never take another economics course. 

We will use a new paradigm called CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources for Economics) that was launched in 2017.  As a contributor to CORE, I would like to share with you the CORE vision, as quoted from www.core-econ.org:

CORE’s vision is that a radically transformed economics education can contribute to a more just, sustainable, and democratic world in which future citizens are empowered by a new economics to understand and debate how best to address pressing societal problems.

OUR MISSION TO ACHIEVE OUR VISION

• change economics education globally to a focus on the most important problems faced by our societies including climate change, injustice, innovation and the future of work,
• put the student at the centre of pedagogy using learning materials and experiences attuned both to the societal problems that students care about and to how students acquire facility and confidence in using and communicating economics,
• make knowledge freely available on a global scale by providing high-quality open access educational resources,
• help change who studies economics to include more women and other underrepresented groups by changing content, pedagogy and access to knowledge.

Prerequisites: ECON BC3033 or ECON BC3035, and ECON BC2411 or STAT W1111 or STAT W1211, or permission of the instructor. Specification, estimation and evaluation of economic relationships using economic theory, data, and statistical inference; testable implications of economic theories; econometric analysis of topics such as consumption, investment, wages and unemployment, and financial markets.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and the completion of all courses (except for the senior requirement) required for the economics track, political economy track, or economics and mathematics majors. Exceptions to these prerequisites may be granted by the chair of the department only. Seminar sections are limited to 15 students. A topic in economic theory or policy of the instructors choice. See department for current topics and for senior requirement preference forms.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and the completion of all courses (except for the senior requirement) required for the economics track, political economy track, or economics and mathematics majors. Exceptions to these prerequisites may be granted by the chair of the department only. Seminar sections are limited to 15 students. A topic in economic theory or policy of the instructors choice. See department for current topics and for senior requirement preference forms.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and the completion of all courses (except for the senior requirement) required for the economics track, political economy track, or economics and mathematics majors. Exceptions to these prerequisites may be granted by the chair of the department only. Seminar sections are limited to 15 students. A topic in economic theory or policy of the instructors choice. See department for current topics and for senior requirement preference forms.

Prerequisites: ECON BC3033 or ECON BC3035 or permission of the instructor. Topic(s), requirements, workload and point value to be determined in consultation with faculty advisor. Forms available at the Office of the Registrar.

Prerequisites: ECON BC3033 or ECON BC3035 or permission of the instructor. Topic(s), requirements, workload and point value to be determined in consultation with faculty advisor. Forms available at the Office of the Registrar.

Prerequisites: ECON BC3033 or ECON BC3035 or permission of the instructor. Topic(s), requirements, workload and point value to be determined in consultation with faculty advisor. Forms available at the Office of the Registrar.

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 or the equivalent. Introduction to the principles of money and banking. The intermediary institutions of the American economy and their historical developments, current issues in monetary and financial reform.

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412  Selected topics in microeconomics. 

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412  Selected topics in microeconomics. 

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Registration information is posted on the departments Seminar Sign-up webpage. Selected topics in macroeconomics. Selected topics will be posted on the departments webpage.

This course provides an opportunity for students in the Economics Master of Arts Program to engage in off-campus internships for academic credit that will count towards their requirements for the degree. The internships will facilitate the application of economic skills that students have developed in the program and prepare them for future work in the field.

This is a required course that facilitates the capstone research paper writing process for second-year students enrolled in the M.A. Program in Economics. The research paper provides an opportunity to write a substantial piece of academic work in which the student is expected to demonstrate mastery of a field, along with the ability to think originally and to convey results clearly in writing.

Discussion Section for Economics MA Course Economic Policy Analysis

Prerequisites: ECON G6411 and ECON G6412. The goal of the course is to equip students with basic econometric tools to analyze problems in macroeconomics and finance. This is not a theory course. The emphasis will be on implementation.

The dramatic rise of the world's population in the last two centuries, coupled with an even more dramatic acceleration of economic development in many parts of the world, has led to an unprecedented transformation of the natural environment by humans. In particular, on account of the greenhouse effect, global climate change has emerged as an existential problem, unrivaled in its potential for harm to life as we know it. The aim of this course is to examine the economics of climate change in a systematic fashion, with an emphasis on economic theory. Topics of coverage can include welfare economics, the theory of dynamic games, dynamic commons problems, club theory, hold up, and endogenous treaty emergence.

Prerequisites: Completion of 1st year graduate program in Economics, or the instructor's permission. The standard model of economic behavior describes a perfectly rational, self interested utility maximizer with unlimited cognitive resources. In many cases, this provides a good approximation to the types of behavior that economists are interested in. However, over the past 30 years, experimental and behavioral economists have documented ways in which the standard model is not just wrong, but is wrong in ways that are important for economic outcomes. Understanding these behaviors, and their implications, is one of the most exciting areas of current economic inquiry. This course will study three important topics within behavioral economics: Bounded rationality, temptation and self control and reference dependent preferences. It will draw on research from behavioral economics, experimental economics, decision theory, psychology and neuroscience in order to describe the models that have been developed to explain failures of the standard approach, the evidence in support of these models, and their economic implications.