Being able to evaluate the consequences of public policies and public programs and to ensure a more efficient allocation of society’s resources is particularly important. Markets can fail, but this does not ensure that governments themselves cannot fail. Cost-Benefit Analysis is a fundamental tool for normative analysis. The broad purpose of CBA is to help social decision making, providing policy makers with the instrument to evaluate whether a given policy is going to increase or decrease the welfare of the society. The aim of this course is to give students an understanding both of practical aspects of Cost-Benefit Analysis as well as its economic and philosophical foundations.

This course presents the theory and practice of international trade policy. The topics discussed are the following: Comparative Advantage, Economies of scale, Imperfect Competition, The Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson Model, Extensions and Elaborations of the Basic Theory. The course covers some advanced topics in international trade, in particular the theory of multinational enterprises and foreign direct investment.

This course is designed as a course in theoretical industrial organization, with some discussion of anti-trust policies. The course starts with an introduction to game theory, and then discuss theories of monopoly, homogeneous and differentiated products oligopoly, oligopoly models with asymmetric information, entry, research and development in oligopoly, and advertising.

This is an advanced course in microeconomics, more precisely on general equilibrium in financial markets. The objective of this course is to introduce students to the economic theory of incomplete financial markets. The topics covered by this course are: The two-period Financial economy, Walras equilibrium and contingent commodities, Financial equilibrium with Arrow securities, Asset financial structure, Absence of arbitrage opportunities, Characterization of the no-arbitrage property, No-arbitrage and financial equilibrium, Completeness and incompleteness of financial markets, Existence of financial equilibrium, Arbitrage and price revelation with asymmetric information, Arbitrage and asset pricing, Risk and its measures, Optimal portfolios with two-dates consumption, Mean-variance portfolio analysis, Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).

This course aims at acquainting students with traditional topics in labor economics, and introducing the literature of labor economics dealing with these topics. Primary topics are the theory of labor supply, labor demand, human capital, wage and employment determination, discrimination, and unemployment.

This course is about the fundamental questions in the economics of the public sector: what the public sector should do that the private sector cannot do? How to design optimally government actions to regulate monopolies and externalities and to provide public goods? What are the limits to redistribution and what are the best ways to redistribute income? How to tax consumption and labour income efficiently? What are the effects of globalization for public finance?