This page lists the full description of courses offered in the 2014-15 academic session. When available, textbook information is provided as well. It is recommended that you do not purchase any textbooks until after the first class. To register, please use the UBC Student Services Centre.
Term 1 courses
An introduction to microeconomic theory. Topics include: decision making under risk and uncertainty, consumer theory, the firm, general equilibrium and game theory.
Note: For M.A. students only.
Textbook: Geoffrey A. Jehle and Philip J. Reny, Advanced Microeconomic Theory, 3rd edition.
This course introduces students to modern macroeconomic theory, with a particular focus on dynamic general equilibrium models. We will start by defining the main theoretical concepts and by exploring the basic structure underlying these models. We will then apply the framework in the study of consumption decisions, asset pricing, economic fluctuations, and growth. The study of these topics is complemented with practical applications, ranging from the United States and Canada's historical experiences to cross-country comparisons, to the 2008-09 financial crisis.
Note: For M.A. students only.
Textbook: TBA.
What happens when economic theory meets the experimental lab? We will cover some of the fascinating and fruitful interactions between the two, including: choice under risk and uncertainty, the endowment effect and status quo bias, intertemporal choice, temptation and self-control, other-regarding preferences, overconfidence, and bounded rationality in games.
Note: This is an advanced topics course. For Ph.D. students only.
Prerequisites: Econ 600, 601, 602 & 603.
Textbooks: TBA.
The primary goal for this course is providing some analytical tools necessary for graduate work in economics. This will require reviewing basic topics in mathematics, such as real analysis, calculus, matrix algebra, and static optimization.
Note: For M.A. students only. There is an online Math Review that should be completed prior to the start of this course. (URL tba.)
Prerequisites: Econ 320, or the equivalent.
Suggested Textbook: Carl P. Simon and Laurence Blume, Mathematics for Economists, Norton, 1994.
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of econometrics. The static linear regression model is the main focus of the course although extensions to dynamic and nonlinear models and simultaneous equations are pursued as well. Estimation and testing methods discussed will include those based on ordinary least squares, generalized least squares, generalized method of moments and instrumental variables, and maximum likelihood. Small sample results will be discussed, however, the main focus will be placed on the large sample theory.
Note: For M.A. students only.
Textbook: Russell Davidson and James G. MacKinnon, Econometric Theory and Methods, Oxford University Press.
This course focuses broadly on questions related to economic development and the behavior of households and institutions in developing nations. The aim is to understand key factors that affect poverty alleviation and inequality. The course works through a selection of papers currently at the frontier of development economics research. Topics include informal institutions, field experiments, household behaviour, political economy, environment, health, conflict, and gender.
Note: This is an advanced topics course. For Ph.D. students only.
Prerequisites: Econ 600, 601, 602 & 603.
Textbook: TBA.
ECON 551 covers topics in Public Economics focused on the revenues side of the government budget. The course provides a thorough grounding in the core theoretical foundations of taxation, followed by forays into current research on applied topics. Areas covered include social choice, optimal taxation, tax incidence, labour taxation, capital taxation, and fiscal federalism. By the end of the course, students will have gained familiarity with the core of the field and be ready to read and contribute at the frontier of research in Public Economics.
Note: This is an advanced topics course. For Ph.D. students only.
Prerequisites: Econ 600, 601, 602 & 603.
Textbook: TBA.
This course surveys neoclassical models of the labour market, including labour supply, labour demand and labour market equilibrium, self-selection and the Roy model, investment in human capital, returns to education. It also delves into more specialized topics such wage inequality, technological change and labour market institutions, group differences in wages and labour market discrimination, social mobility and social interactions.
Note: This is an advanced topics course. For Ph.D. students only.
Prerequisites: Econ 600, 601, 602 & 603.
Textbook: TBA.
This course focuses on empirical methods in industrial organization. Topics covered include: production function and productivity estimation, demand for differentiated products, models of entry and market structure, and dynamic models of firm investment.
Note: This is an advanced topics course. For Ph.D. students only.
Prerequisites: Econ 600, 601, 602, 603, 626 & 627.
Textbook: TBA.
An advanced course in microeconomic theory. Topics include decision theory, behavioral economics, subjective and higher order beliefs in games, fixed point methods in equilibrium theory, matching.
Note: For Ph.D. students only.
Textbook: TBA.
This course introduces students to modern macroeconomic theory, with a particular focus on dynamic general equilibrium models. We will start by defining the main theoretical concepts and by exploring the basic structure underlying these models. We will then apply the framework in the study of consumption and investment decisions, economic fluctuations, and growth. The study of these topics is complemented with practical applications that involve the use of numerical methods.
Note: For Ph.D. students only.
Textbook: TBA.
This course introduces statistical foundations and econometric methodologies that are useful in empirical researches in economics. The topics covered in the course include measure-theoretic probability theory, analysis of linear regression models, basic concepts of asymptotic analysis, maximum likelihood estimation, and generalized method-of-moments.
Note: For Ph.D. students only.
Textbook: TBA.
This is a course in applied econometrics for Ph.D. students who are interested in empirical microeconomics. The goals of this course include (i) to familiarize yourself with econometric techniques that are useful for applied work, (ii) to build a bridge between economics and econometrics, and (iii) to provide you with hands-on experience of coding in Matlab, Gauss and Stata.
Note: For PhD Economics students only.
Prerequisite: Econ 626 and 627.
Textbook: TBA.
Term 2 courses
This course covers topics in the theory of information and incentives. The focus is on problems in which individuals do not share common information about economically relevant events. Topics may include value of information and experimentation, adverse selection, contract theory, strategic information transmission, information aggregation, and mechanism design. Applications may include industrial organization, strategic communication, political economy, financial market, committee decisions, voting, and search and matching.
Textbook: TBA.
This course aims to provide students with a set of computational and modeling skills that can be easily employed for the analysis of macroeconomic phenomena, as well as to answer microeconomic questions relating to the optimal choices of individuals, households and groups. The main purpose of this course is to introduce methods which allow to map data evidence into computational models: such methods can be used for the quantitative evaluation of government policies, historical inequality patterns, individual and aggregate wage dynamics, individual and households' responses to shocks, firms' growth patterns and many other problems. At the end of the course students should be able to apply such methods in their own work, if they so wish, and to pursue independent quantitative analysis using computational methods learned in class.
The course provides: (i) an in depth discussion of specific topics in Macroeconomics (this may include consumption, investment, unemployment, asset pricing or others, depending on specific interests of both teacher and class); (ii) an overview of general equilibrium analysis and its existing (and potential) applications to the topics listed above, with a special focus on applications which entail the use of economies where agents are heterogeneous and markets are incomplete; (iii) an overview of computational methods to numerically solve for optimal individual decisions of economic agents as well as for equilibria of the model economies discussed in class.
Students will be asked to reproduce results from one or more applied and computational papers. Collaboration among students is strongly encouraged when solving computational assignments, which often involve sharing information and dividing tasks in the spirit of co-authorship. Based on past years' experience, by the end of the course students will be able to set up, analyze and numerically compute models with heterogeneous agents.
Textbook: TBA.
For several millennia, the income of the vast bulk of humanity hovered around subsistence levels. While occasional great civilizations and powerful states arose, they only provided above-subsistence income for an elite, before invariably declining and dying off. At some point in the second millennium, Western Europe saw the coalescing of forces that would eventually allow it to break away from this pattern. This course is an attempt to understand what was different about Western Europe. Why did it end up ruling over most of the rest of the world, and not vice versa? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen there? And, more importantly, how do these processes inform our understanding of modern economic theory? As part of the course, students will write an original research paper on a topic of their choosing.
Textbook: TBA
In this course we work through a selection of the most important and/or interesting papers currently at the frontier of development economics research. Topics of particular focus are those relating to culture, institutions and political economy, but other areas for which there is considerable student interest are also explored.
Textbook: TBA.
This course addresses the interactions between profit-maximizing firms and a vast class of non-market agents, such as governments, political, legal and regulatory institutions, and the public. The focus of the class is on both international and US environments. The class emphasizes the operative implications of non-market institutions in affecting and constraining firm strategy. Topics and cases cover analysis of economic and political institutions, economic policy, lobbying and special interest activity, regulation and antitrust, activism and media.
Textbook: TBA.
This is a macroeconomics topics course with an emphasis on practical skills for macroeconomics/monetary economics research and practice. We will cover a number of applications of macro theory to monetary economics, macro-finance, (bounded) rational expectations, and Bayesian learning/estimation. As central banks and policy makers often use "new-Keynesian" dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models for analysis, one of the main goals will be to understand how these models are constructed, solved, simulated, and estimated on a computer. Some familiarity with time series econometrics, dynamic general equilibrium models, and computer programming will be expected.
Textbook: TBA.
ECON 550 is a graduate course in public economics with a focus on the design of social programs. Topics include: local public goods, health care, poverty relief, and disability and unemployment insurance. These issues will be explored from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective.
Textbook: TBA.
This course examines recent issues in international finance and open economy macroeconomics. Topics covered will include: (1) the interaction of international capital markets and aggregate fluctuations, (2) the consequences of alternative international asset market structures, (3) models of current account determination, (4) models of nominal and real exchange rate determination and the international monetary transmission mechanism, and (5) models of currency and debt crises.
Textbook: TBA.
This course reviews the positive and normative aspects of international trade and economic globalization more broadly. Topics include: theories and empirical patterns of (1) international trade and (2) international organization of production (multinationals, offshoring, firm boundaries); (3) distributional effects of trade; and (4), trade policy. The course emphasizes keeping a tight link between the theory and the data.
Textbook: TBA.
This course surveys topics in labour economics. We will deal with neoclassical labour supply and demand quickly then cover human capital issues in more detail. We will move on to developing a search and bargaining framework and use it to consider topics such as immigration, changes in the wage structure, unions, and labour market policy effects.
Textbook: TBA.
This course in applied econometrics is suitable for M.A. students who have completed Econ 527 and who seek a foundation in the modern methods of policy evaluation. It will also be of interest to Ph.D. students with interests in applied microeconomics.
The course will survey empirical methods for policy evaluation. The focus will be on empirical applications. Topics covered will include causal inferences, treatment effects, randomized controlled trials, differencing methods, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and matching methods.
Textbook: (Recommended) Joshua D. Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics.
Governments intervene in modern economies in a number of ways and for a number of reasons. This course will explore a select set of these interventions in an attempt to understand their purposes and effects. The major focus will be on the use of competition policy to control business behaviour. This will include analysis of the economic theory of competition policy as well as applications in policy documents and cases. Other topics considered will include: (i) theories of regulation; (ii) the control of natural monopolies; and (iii) public enterprise and privatization.
Textbook: TBA.
This is a graduate-level course in environmental economics. Much of the course will focus on the analysis of environmental policies, with an emphasis on pollution regulation. Other topics will include recent work on climate change, growth and the environment, trade and the environment, innovation, effects of pollution on health, second best issues (such as double dividend), and a couple of issues in renewable resource management. The course is suitable for both M.A. and Ph.D. students.
Textbook: TBA.
An advanced course in microeconomic theory - focuses on game theory as an instrument for studying strategic interactions. Topics include: equilibrium concepts and refinements, incentives and mechanism design. uncertainty and information, repeated games.
Prerequisite: Econ 600.
Textbook: TBA.
The course is organized around a set of topics, including aggregation in macroeconomics, optimal taxation, consumption and insurance, unemployment, search and money, heterogeneity in macroeconomics. There are two objectives to the course: (1) familiarize students with topics which are commonly studied in the macroeconomic literature; (2) provide some basic techniques used in the analysis of such topics.
Prerequisite: Econ 602.
Textbook: TBA.
A continuation of Econ 626, this course consists of two parts. In the first part, we begin by discussing identification and estimation of linear simultaneous equations models. The course then proceeds to the theory of extremum estimators, which covers nonlinear econometric models. The second part of the course covers topics in time series econometrics including stationarity and ergodicity, mixing and linear processes, heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent variance estimation.
Prerequisite: Econ 626.
Textbook: TBA.
Terms 1 and 2
A seminar course to assist students in identifying a viable research topic for a Ph.D. dissertation. Students who have passed the comprehensive examinations must be registered in Econ 640 until a dissertation prospectus has been successfully presented. In each year in which the student is enrolled in 640, a research or survey paper must be submitted for approval to two faculty members, one of which is the faculty member in charge of 640. Attendance is mandatory for post-comp Ph.D. students.
Note: For Ph.D. Economics students only.
Offered in 2015 Summer Session
The purpose of this course is to provide students with experience in applied research. Attention is devoted to problems encountered in combining economic theory with econometric methods in empirical research. Each student is required to undertake an empirical research project the results of which are summarized in an extended essay.
Note: For M.A. Economics students only