ECON 443Economics Of Labor

Catalog

Prerequisites - Grades of C or better in ECON 360; also grades of C or better in college level statistics and calculus. In this course, I will demonstrate how to apply and extend Intermediate Microeconomic Theory to study firms' and workers' behavior. Primary focus will be on labor supply and unemployment. The course also covers topics such as labor demand, wage inequality, discrimination, mobility, and issues such as how wars, technological change, and artificial intelligence affect labor supply, and how policies such as minimum wage and unemployment benefits affect the labor market. I will demonstrate how to integrate microeconomic theory to reconcile empirical trends in the labor market and how to use basic statistics to quantify various phenomena in the labor market. While the course is not designed to dwell on abstraction, basic theoretical underpinnings of various topics are core to competent analysis and intellectual discussion. Thus, another objective of the course is to hone students' analytic skill using basic math. While basic mathematics is employed as a main part in this course, mindless number exercises is not. Format: Debate