Recently Offered Advanced Topics Courses

The techniques of mechanism design are widely used in various economic models and analysis. We plan to cover the theory and applications of mechanism design this year. The topics we plan to cover are auctions, contests and mechanism design. We first review the concept of Bayesian equilibrium and perfect Bayesian equilibrium, and then auction theory. We then discuss papers in auctions and mechanism design. The last topic is contest and contest design.

Students are asked to actively participate in class discussions, including asking and answering questions. Furthermore, each student is asked to study a paper (from the literature) and present it in class. Finally, each student is asked to build a simple model involving auctions and/or contests and perform some preliminary analysis.

This is a PhD-level field course on experimental economics, with an emphasis on field experiments. We will discuss how experimentation can be used to test economic theories and investigate social phenomena. The goal is to teach students how to critically consume the experimental literature, as well as design, implement, and analyze their own experiments. The course will consist of lectures, discussions of research papers, as well as a final project that could become a dissertation chapter. The background for the course is graduate-level microeconomic theory and econometrics.

This is the first section of the Ph.D. topics course of macro and money. This section of the course interprets macro and money broadly. The common theme is the presence of market frictions. The lectures will go through a small number of articles in detail, leaving the extensive reading of related articles to the students. In doing so, this section is intended to serve two purposes. One is to introduce students to a set of economic issues and models, and the other is to help students start thinking about research that will eventually lead to the dissertation in the field. It is important to understand both the economic idea in each article and the way in which a model is worked out to illustrate this idea. Depending on the economic issue involved, some articles are qualitative while others are quantitative. Students are expected to actively participate in the course through discussions and presentations. They are also expected to work out the models presented in the class and read the closely related papers.

This course combines theory, applications, and estimation of models of worker and firm behavior in imperfect markets, with a specific focus on topics including wage dispersion, wage dynamics, price setting, and market power. The course is designed to help students understand and explain real-life phenomena in the data, and to provide the theoretical, computational, and empirical tools to perform cutting-edge quantitative policy and economic analysis. The material is drawn equally from Macroeconomics, Industrial Organization and Labor Economics.

The course covers a wide range of advanced econometric concepts and methods. In the first part of the course, a theory of weak and partial identification will be presented including some recent advances in these areas. In addition, some modern approaches to sensitivity analysis will be discussed. The second part of the course will introduce students to classical methods and problems of non-parametric estimation. Next the methods for improving estimation and inference in the presence of shape restrictions will be discussed. The final part of the course will discuss econometric models for Industrial Organization. The tools introduced in class will be illustrated with examples from modern economics research.

 

This course provides PhD students with the necessary knowledge and tools to do research in industrial organization and competition policy. The material covered in this class focuses mostly on the structure of markets, and the strategic behavior of firms and consumers. The emphasis will be on empirical work, but we will also spend time talking about the importance of combining data with theory and suitable econometric techniques in order to study issues in Industrial Organization. Topics include the evaluation of market power and mergers, product differentiation, productivity, collusion, price discrimination, entry and product positioning, and auctions.

This is the first section of the Ph.D. topics course of macro and money. This section of the course interprets macro and money broadly. The common theme is the presence of market frictions. The lectures will go through a small number of articles in detail, leaving the extensive reading of related articles to the students.

In doing so, this section is intended to serve two purposes. One is to introduce students to a set of economic issues and models, and the other is to help students start thinking about research that will eventually lead to the dissertation in the field.

It is important to understand both the economic idea in each article and the way in which a model is worked out to illustrate this idea. Depending on the economic issue involved, some articles are qualitative while others are quantitative.

Students are expected to actively participate in the course through discussions and presentations. They are also expected to work out the models presented in the class and read the closely related papers.

This is a PhD-level field course on experimental economics, with an emphasis on field experiments. We will discuss how experimentation can be used to test economic theories and investigate social phenomena. The goal is to teach students how to critically consume the experimental literature, as well as design, implement, and analyze their own experiments.

The course will consist of lectures, discussions of research papers, as well as a final project that could become a dissertation chapter. The background for the course is graduate-level microeconomic theory and econometrics.

The objective of this course is to provide PhD students with the necessary knowledge and tools to do research in industrial organization and competition policy. The material covered in this class focuses mostly on the structure of markets, and the strategic behavior of firms and consumers.

The emphasis will be on empirical work, but we will also spend time talking about the importance of combining data with theory and suitable econometric techniques in order to study issues in Industrial Organization.

The topics that will be covered include the evaluation of market power and mergers, product differentiation, productivity, collusion, price discrimination, entry and product positioning, and auctions.

This is a graduate course on microeconomic theory. The primary goal of the course is to understand the roles of information in markets, and we cover topics that are at the intersection of information economics and industrial organization.

This course combines theory, applications, and estimation of models of job search and firm behavior in imperfect markets, with a specific focus on topics including wage dispersion, wage dynamics, price setting, and market power.

The course is designed to help students understand and explain real-life phenomena in the data, and to provide the theoretical, computational, and empirical tools to perform cutting-edge quantitative policy and economic analysis.