Consumption and savings decisions under certainty and uncertainty. Aggregate savings, wealth, and fiscal policy. Portfolio choice and asset pricing. Investment and finance decisions. Half-term subject. This course covers issues in the theory of consumption, investment and asset prices. We lay out the basic models first, and then examine the empirical facts that motivate extensions to these models.

The basic machines of macroeconomics. Ramsey, Solow, Samuelson-Diamond, RBCs, ISLM, Mundell-Fleming, Fischer-Taylor. How they work, what shortcuts they take, and how they can be used. Half-term subject.

Models of economic growth, old and new. Half-term subject. Introduction to the theories of economic growth. Topics will include basic facts of economic growth and long-run economic development; brief overview of optimal control theory and dynamic programming; basic neoclassical growth model under a variety of market structures; human capital and economic growth; endogenous growth models; models with endogenous technology; models of directed technical change; competition, market structure and growth; financial and economic development; international trade and economic growth; institutions and economic development.

Macroeconomics provides an introduction to economic principles and market forces including supply and demand, unemployment, inflation, international trade and capital flows, monetary policy and banking, fiscal policy and globalization.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the structure of the American economy as compared to other economic structures. Supply and demand, GDP, inflation, monetary policy, money and banking, taxation, economic growth, international exchange and comparisons of classical, Keynesian and monetarist economic philosophies are presented. It is required for business majors planning to transfer to 4-year business programs in the state of Washington.Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

This class is a global survey of the great transformation in history known as the "Industrial Revolution." Topics include origins of mechanized production, the factory system, steam propulsion, electrification, mass communications, mass production and automation. Emphasis on the transfer of technology and its many adaptations around the world. Countries treated include Great Britain, France, Germany, the US, Sweden, Russia, Japan, China, and India. Includes brief reflection papers and a final paper.

Everyday we are bombarded with the word "global" and encouraged to see globalization as the quintessential transformation of our age. But what exactly does "globalization" mean? How is it affecting the lives of people around the world, not only in economic, but social and cultural terms? How do contemporary changes compare with those from other historical periods? Are such changes positive, negative or simply inevitable? And, finally, how does the concept of the "global" itself shape our perceptions in ways that both help us understand the contemporary world and potentially distort it? This course begins by offering a brief overview of historical "world systems," including those centered in Asia as well as Europe. It explores the nature of contemporary transformations, including those in economics, media & information technologies, population flows, and consumer habits, not through abstractions but by focusing on the daily lives of people in various parts of the world. This course considers such topics as the day-to-day impact of computers in Silicon Valley and among Tibetan refugees; the dilemmas of factory workers in the US and rural Java; the attractions of Bombay cinema in Nigeria, the making of rap music in Japan, and the cultural complexities of immigrant life in France. This course seeks not only to understand the various forms globalization takes, but to understand its very different impacts world-wide.

Seminar designed to provide close case study examinations of specific media or media configurations and the larger social, cultural, economic, political, or technological contexts within which they operate. Subject organized around recurring themes in media history, specific genres or movements, specific media, or specific historical moments. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication. Topic: Comics, Cartoons, and Graphic Storytelling. Meets with CMS.871, but assignments differ.

This course will survey the conditions of material life and changing social and economic conditions in medieval Europe with reference to the comparative context of contemporary Islamic, Chinese, and central Asian experiences. Subject covers the emergence and decline of feudal institutions, the transformation of peasant agriculture, living standards and the course of epidemic disease, and the ebb and flow of long-distance trade across the Eurasian system. Particular emphasis will be placed on the study of those factors, both institutional and technological, which have contributed to the emergence of capitalist organization and economic growth in Western Europe in contrast to the trajectories followed by the other major medieval economies.

This half-semester course provides an introduction to microeconomic theory designed to meet the needs of students in an economics Ph.D. program. Some parts of the course are designed to teach material that all graduate students should know. Others are used to introduce methodologies. Students should be comfortable with multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and basic real analysis.

This course offers an introduction to noncooperative game theory. The course is intended both for graduate students who wish to develop a solid background in game theory in order to pursue research in the applied fields of economics and related disciplines, and for students wishing to specialize is economic theory. While the course is designed for graduate students in economics, it is open to all students who have taken and passed 14.121. The recommended primary text for the course is Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole's text, Game Theory. The text covers all the material in the course and much more, but has less in the way of intuition and examples than some students would like. For this reason, students might alternately wish to use Robert Gibbons' Game Theory for Applied Economists as their primary reference. Gibbons' book contains more readable discussions of the material and a lot of nice examples, but omits a few of the topics we'll cover. The course will be graded on the basis of five problem sets and a three hour final exam. In order to learn the material it is absolutely essential to do the problem sets. The problem sets will count for approximately one-fourth of the course grade.

This is a half-semester course which covers the topics in Microeconomic Theory that everybody with a Ph.D. from MIT Economics Department should know but that have not yet been covered in the Micro sequence. Hence, it covers several unrelated topics. The topics come from three general areas: Decision Theory, Game Theory, and Behaviorla Economics.  I will try my best to put them in a coherent narrative, but there will be inherent jumps from topic to topic.

Microeconomics provides an introduction to economic principles and market forces including supply and demand, labor and financial markets, elasticity, consumer choices, cost and industry structure, competition, monopoly, negative and positive externalities, economic inequality, financial markets, international trade, globalization and protectionism.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the functions of the market system including allocation of scarce resources, production of goods and services, determination of prices, output and profit maximization in competitive and monopolistic markets. It is required for business majors planning to transfer to 4-year business programs in the state of Washington.Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

Microeconomics will ground you in - surprise - basic microeconomics-how markets function, how to think about allocating scarce resources among competing uses, what profit maximizing behavior means in industries with different numbers of competitors, how technology and trade reshapes the opportunities people face, and so on. We will apply economic ideas to understand current economic problems, including the housing bubble, the current unemployment situation (particularly for high school gradutes), how Google makes its money and why healthcare costs are rising so fast.

This course will highlight common principles that permeate the functioning of networks and how the same issues related to robustness, fragility and interlinkages arise in several different types of networks. It will both introduce conceptual tools from dynamical systems, random graph models, optimization and game theory, and cover a wide variety of applications.

This course presents micro-econometric models, including large sample theory for estimation and hypothesis testing, generalized method of moments (GMM), estimation of censored and truncated specifications, quantile regression, structural estimation, nonparametric and semiparametric estimation, treatment effects, panel data, bootstrapping, simulation methods, and Bayesian methods. The methods are illustrated with economic applications

Introductory Business Statistics is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the one-semester statistics course for business, economics, and related majors. Core statistical concepts and skills have been augmented with practical business examples, scenarios, and exercises. The result is a meaningful understanding of the discipline, which will serve students in their business careers and real-world experiences.

This course in organizational economics prepares doctoral students for further study in the field. The course introduces the classic papers and some recent research. The material is organized into the following modules: boundaries of the firm, employment in organizations, decision-making in organizations, and structures and processes in organizations. Each class session covers a few leading papers. This course was joint-taught between faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The Harvard course is Economics 2670 Organizational Economics.

Examines theory and research on the relationship of organizations to each other and to their economic, political, and social environments. Classic and contemporary approaches to complex social systems, the dynamics of inertia and change, the role of legitimacy, and the production of change as an intended or unintended consequence. Considers the relative roles of voluntarism and determinism in the pursuit of organizational agendas and in the shaping of organizational environments, for example, with respect to changing employment relationships and environmentalism. Primarily for doctoral students. The goal of this doctoral course is to familiarize students with major conceptual frameworks, debates, and developments in contemporary organization theory. This is an inter-disciplinary domain of inquiry drawing primarily from sociology, and secondarily from economics, psychology, anthropology, and political science. The course focuses on inter-organizational processes, and also addresses the economic, institutional and cultural contexts that organizations must face. This is an introduction to a vast and multifaceted domain of inquiry. Due to time limitations, this course will touch lightly on many important topics, and neglect others entirely; its design resembles more a map than an encyclopedia. Also, given the focus on theoretical matters, methodological issues will move to the background. Empirical material will be used to illustrate how knowledge is produced from a particular standpoint and trying to answer particular questions, leaving the bulk of the discussion on quantitative and qualitative procedures to seminars such as 15.347, 15.348, and the like.