Senior Seminar Descriptions

Spring 2025

Economics Senior Seminar Descriptions

Seminars listed below are only open to CC and GS undergraduate economics majors.

NOTE: All seminars will satisfy the FE major for this semester.

PLEASE NOTE: ALL PREREQUISITES (ECON UN3211, UN3213, UN3412) must be successfully completed before the seminar may be taken—not after and not concurrently, otherwise the seminar will not count towards the major. Check the CC/GS bulletin for all seminar prerequisites and details.

DAYS, TIMES and CLASSROOMS can be found on the Registrar’s Directory of Classes.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 1) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Murat Yilmaz
Day/Time: Tues. 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Topic: Economics of Industrial Organization
This seminar will focus on a variety of topics within industrial organization, which is concerned with the study of imperfectly competitive market structures and strategic interaction among firms. The topics to be covered include but are not limited to price discrimination, product differentiation, dynamic competition under demand shocks, entry deterrence, and also some behavioral concepts that are widely incorporated into the study of industrial organization, such as loss aversion and inequity aversion. A reading list will be provided along with a few recommended textbooks. Each student is expected to give two presentations: one on a paper chosen from the reading list, and another on the student’s agreed-upon research topic. A term paper based on the student’s research topic is required. Active class participation during the lectures and presentations is expected.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 2) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Dr. Sunil Gulati
Day/Time: Mon. 2:10pm – 4:00pm
Topic: Sports Economics
This seminar will focus on an economic analysis of the sports industry. Topics covered will include economics of sports leagues, the labor market for professional athletes, sports marketing and broadcasting, economic impact of teams & stadiums and antitrust policies. A number of guest speakers from the sports world (including the professional leagues and media industry) will be featured. One textbook and a number of separate readings will be assigned. Seminar students are expected to actively participate in class discussions, make an in class presentation of selected readings and of original work and write a term paper on an agreed upon topic.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 3) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Douglas Almond
Day/Time: Mon. 10:10am – 12:00pm
Topic: Environmental Economics
This seminar explores environmental economics and climate change mitigation from an applied-micro perspective.  Readings include natural experiment-based “reduced form” research papers that utilize the practical and persuasive applied econometric tools such as difference-in-differences and the regression discontinuity design, as advocated by the most recent Nobel laureates in economics, Angrist, Card, Imbens). This empirical thread will be complemented by discussion of conventional environmental econ topics/frameworks, including why unregulated markets lead to suboptimal environmental outcomes due to market failures such as externalities and public goods.  We will also discuss approaches for addressing market failures, including command-and-control style regulation, subsidies and taxes, pollution permits, and delineation of property rights.  Students will initiate an original research project that leverages a natural experiment to support causal statements and inference, essential to identifying effective policies to address pressing environmental challenges and climate change.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 4) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Graciela Chichilnisky
Day/Time: Wed. 2:10pm – 4:00pm
Topic: Globalization and its Risks
The world is being transformed by dramatic increases in flows of people, goods and services across nations. Globalization has the potential for enormous gains but is also associated to serious risks. The gains are related to international commerce where the industrial countries dominate, where economic growth in based on a highly resource intensive (including fossil fuels energy) industrial production and exports and while the risks involve the global environment, poverty and the satisfaction of basic needs needed for survival of the human species that affect in great measure the developing nations. Both are linked to a historical division of the world into the North and the South-the industrial and the developing nations. Key to future evolution are (1) the creation of new markets that trade privately produced public goods, such as knowledge and greenhouse gas emissions, as in the Kyoto Protocol carbon market embodied and financially executed in the EU ETS that successfully reduced CO2 emissions by 5% in participating nations from those the base year (2005) over 20 years ago; which now requires a more drastic embodiment as Carbon Removal Market (according eg to the UN IPCC and the US National Academy of Sciences) to reduce the enormous increase in Legacy emissions caused by in non- participating nations (including USA and China), using recent breakthrough carbon removal technologies that can reverse climate change.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 5) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Rosanne Altshuler
Day/Time: Tues. 2:10pm – 4:00pm
Topic: Economics of Tax Policy
Government expenditures are financed through the taxation of individuals and businesses. How should tax policies be structured and who should bear the burden of taxation? This seminar will focus on the economic analysis of tax policy. Topics include, but are not limited to, the impact of the individual income tax on decisions related to savings, labor supply, and investment; the effects of taxes on business decisions such as where and how much to invest; tax avoidance and evasion; and the distributional consequences of tax policies aimed at low- and high-income individuals. Each student is expected to give two presentations: one on a paper chosen from the reading list, and another on the student’s agreed-upon research topic. A term paper based on the student’s research topic is required. Active class participation during the lectures and presentations is expected.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 6) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Pedro Tremacoldi Rossi
Day/Time: Tues. 10:10am – 12:00pm
Topic: Microstructure of Financial Markets
This seminar will explore the institutions, trading mechanisms, and economic models underlying modern financial markets. Students will learn how electronic markets are structured, the different incentives that allocation algorithms generate to market participants, including strategic responses and their impact on market stability. Topics will also cover other core areas in market microstructure, focusing on how information gets incorporated into prices, how traders with information of varying quality interact and affect the functioning of markets, and how technology potentially rewards predatory behavior. With many assets trading thousands of times during the blink of an eye, the outsized role of speed and technology in finance will also be reflected in class with big data applications exploring high-frequency data and the appropriate statistical tools for their analysis.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 7) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Ben Ho
Day/Time: Mon. 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Topic: The Economics of Trust
Civilization is built on cooperation, and cooperation is built on trust. Yet while the likes of Ken Arrow and Amartya Sen noted that only a “rational fool” would neglect the importance of relationships and trust, it’s not something that comes up often in economics classes.  Using the tools of behavioral economics, experimental economics, and game theory, we investigate the institutional history of trust from its origins in human biology to the advent of blockchain.  Along the way we will investigate the institutional origins of religion, international trade and the rule of law, examine the role of trust in modern markets and financial systems, and examine how trust is central to solving the greatest challenges in human cooperation today, from public health to climate change.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 8) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Abere
Day/Time: Tues. 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Topic: Economic Analysis of Law
Economics is an essential tool for both understanding the rules we have (positive economics) and deciding what rules we should have (normative economics). A law is an obligation backed by a state penalty (such as payments to injured parties, fines imposed by the government, and incarceration). To an economist, these penalties look just like prices, and presumably people respond to penalties just like they respond to prices. People respond to higher (lower) prices for a good by consuming less (more) of that good.  Do people respond to higher (lower) penalties for an activity by doing less (more) of that activity?  For example, do people consume more marijuana when it is legalized? Do people drive less if there is congestion pricing?

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GU4913 (Sec. 1) MACROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Richard Clarida
Day/Time: Thurs. 8:10am – 10:00am
Topic: International Monetary Economics
This seminar will study and assess central bank policies in the world’s major economies in the first 20 years of the 21st century. The format will combine lectures with class discussion led by student presentations of recent central bank decisions.  Requirement for the course will be a term paper on the post pandemic monetary policy of a G3 central bank as well as presentation to the class of the paper.

 

GU4913 (Sec. 2) MACROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Joseph Stiglitz / Dr. Karla Hoff
Day/Time: Wed. 10:10am – 12:00pm
Topic: Behavioral Insights into Economic Development
The starting point for this course on behavioral development economics is the recognition that humans think and act very differently than economics has long assumed. Behavioral development economics has two strands. In the first strand, which incorporates insights into human behavior from psychology, the decision maker is the quasi-rational actor. Individuals, for instance, seem to save less than they should and come to regret the decisions that they have made. For specific behaviors that are inefficient and undesirable, government can often design “nudges” to help people avoid making choices they would later regret. This strand has led to advances in many kinds of policies that increase welfare—for example, policies that increase poor households’ savings to finance medical needs and the proportion of their children who are vaccinated.
But such policies are not about changing people—their aspirations, self-efficacy, and how they process information. Development entails individual and societal transformation. Promoting the desired transformation is the subject of the second strand of behavioral development economics and the main focus of the seminar. Here the decision maker is referred to as the quasi-rational, enculturated actor, a psychologically and sociologically more realistic decision maker than either the rational actor (the decision maker in traditional economics) or the quasi-rational actor. How individuals think and what they want are shaped by the social structures and cultures that they have experienced or to which they have been exposed.  A society can get stuck with dysfunctional beliefs and norms that impede economic development. Individuals and whole cultures, including even experts, can fail to learn from the information available to them because their conceptual frames bias their judgment.

 

GU4913 (Sec. 3) MACROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Miles Cary Leahey
Day/Time: Mon. 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Topic: Economic Crises
This course will involve a wide-ranging discussion of the causes and consequences of modern economic crises, most notably the financial crisis of 2007, the pandemic crisis of 2020, and geopolitical crisis of 2022-25. We will first put them into a broad historical perspective, discovering that financial markets, while necessary for modern capitalist economies, are fragile and sometimes break. In 2007, a combination of hubris, greed, debt, poorly understood financial innovation, and inadequate regulation and supervision contributed to the crisis and eventual “great” recession, the worst since the 1930s. In 2020, a self-induced economic lockdown reduced the pandemic health threat but caused an even deeper but much shorter recession compared to 2007. In 2022, the geopolitical and national security situation intensified, exacerbating existing disruptions in commodity prices and supply chains from the pandemic. Inflation reached 8%, a pace not experienced since the 1980s. By late 2024, even though inflation has fallen significantly to less than 3% and unemployment rate had fallen to a low at 4% plus, households (and to a lesser extent firms) are unhappy with current economic conditions. We will learn how all three situations were global in scope and how well economic policymakers handled and are handling them. We will compare economic and financial market performance with that of the “average” of other major disruptions, including the Great Depression. We will finish with a look at how the aftershocks of both crises are contributing to the societal discomfort both in the U.S. and around the globe.

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GU4918 (Sec. 1) Seminar in ECONOMETRICS
Instructor: Dr. Seyhan Erden
Day/Time: Wed. 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Topic: Topics in Macroeconomics and Finance
This is an applied econometrics seminar focusing on macro and financial econometric applications about domestic and international markets. The Great Recession of 2008 clearly verifies the need for a deeper examination of links between volatility in financial markets and fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. In this seminar, we criticize and improve empirical papers that examine this link. The Covid-19 Pandemic injected an exogeneous shock to all macroeconomic and financial series. We study models on macroeconomic series and their forecasts as well as their mutual predictive power on equity and bond markets. We learn about ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average), VAR (Vector Autoregression) VECM (Vector Error Correction Models), volatility models such as ARCH (Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity process of Engle and many of its extensions). Additional topics include capital asset pricing models (CAPM), spurious regression, Structural VAR models, TAR (Threshold Autoregressive Models), Factor Models, IRFs (impulse response functions) and FEVD (forecast error variance decomposition), SVAR models with Panel Data. Students will learn how to conduct – and how to critique – empirical studies in financial and applied time series econometrics and related fields.  Students are expected to choose a topic from a list of research topics and write a paper using econometric methods we discuss in this seminar.