Urban Economics

Catalog description

Microeconomic theory as taught in principles (and even intermediate) does not usually take into account the fact that goods, people, and information must travel in order to interact. Rather, markets are implicitly modeled as if everyone and everything is at a single point in space. In the first part of the course, we will examine the implications of spatial location for economic analysis. In the second part of the class, we will use microeconomic tools to understand urban problems. Topics that we will cover include urban growth, suburbanization, land use, poverty, housing, local government, transportation, education, and crime. Prereq: ECON 102 .