This course continues to emphasize the importance of logical presentation of ideas. Students prepare a summary and an academic critique of academic journal articles. Students give oral presentations, again with a focus on logical presentation of ideas and focus on audience, as well as on pronunciation and grammar. Weekly recitation sessions focus on sentence structure.

This course focuses primarily on reading and writing. Students read longer texts from newspapers and magazines. Writing includes argumentative essays and longer (academic style) summaries, with a focus on logical organization of ideas, connection of ideas, and sentence structure. Students give oral presentations. Weekly recitation sessions continue to focus on grammar.

This course pushes students to engage in more serious academic writing, including an academic critique and a position paper. Students present their ideas orally, as well as in writing. Students also have the opportunity to practice for the oral and written proficiency exams.

This course aims at providing students with understanding of important macroeconomics concepts and knowledge and ability to use computational techniques and procedures necessary for graduate macroeconomics. It also aims at introducing students to important basic macroeconomic models (such as Robinson Crusoe model , two-period consumption model, Solow growth model, cash in advance models, variable capital utilization model), which will provide a good basis for studying more advanced models during future.

The third module of Microeconomics is devoted to the study welfare and public economics.. Our goal is to develop the notion of welfare, externalities and public goods so that this concept can be used in later sections of Microeconomics.

CThe main purpose of these courses is to provide you with a foundation of statistics and probability. The tools learned in these courses are essential building blocks for the other econometrics courses in the sequence. Focus in these courses will be on basic principles, including among other things: probability, random variables, conditional probability, probability densities and distributions, characteristic functions, test statistic formulation and distribution theory, statistical inference, and basic regression. Emphasis will be placed on applied problem solving using the tools learned in the class. In this regard, lab sections will deal with computer assignments (to be implemented in STATA).

The aim of the course is not only to deliver mathematical concepts, which are necessary for most of modern economical problems, but also the ability to apply them. We want to avoid so called “cookbook approach” (the term from Simon & Blum), that is just a set of problems and algorithms for their solutions. Real ability to handle mathematical problems of economics comes only with deep understanding of mathematical ideas and concepts of the course.