Economics Major and Minor

This course examines the changing role of gender in the labor market and the household. Topics include: the rise in females’ formal labor force participation during the second half of the twentieth century; gender differences in employment, occupation, and earnings; theoretical and empirical approaches to studying discrimination; and the interactions between market opportunities, government policies, and family formation.

This course will use economic modeling and empirical tools to study the causes, costs, and consequences of crime. The course will introduce economic models of crime and study what motivates and deters criminal behavior, as well as empirical evidence to evaluate these models. We will discuss the role of higher fines, imprisonment, and other economic and social factors, and the effects of criminal sanctions (primary incarceration) on individuals and the greater effects on society.

This course will build on students’ understanding of statistics and basic econometrics to develop further the empirical model building skills they have acquired previously. The course will provide an overview of classical and modern approaches to forecasting in business, economics, and finance. Topics include regression analysis, exponential smoothing and filtering, ARIMA models, modeling and forecasting trend and seasonality, evaluating and combining forecasts.