Senior Seminar Descriptions

Spring 2026

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: 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. 2) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Lena Edlund
Day/Time: Tues. 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Topic:  Seminar in Gender Economics
This seminar will take a critical look at the family. We will discuss the social, biological and material origins of different family systems, as well as consequences thereof, with a particular focus on the status of women. Sample questions include: Why would sons be considered more valuable than daughters, and why more so in China and India than in the West? Despite similar levels of son preference, women’s status appears greater in China than India, is that correct and if so why? Medieval Europe and 20th century East Asia are prominent examples of growth miracles; what do they have in common? Is contemporary Western family post-patriarchal? #MeToo, why now? Is surrogate motherhood the future? Active class room participation and a term paper are required.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 3) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: 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: 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 q ca China), using recent breakthrough carbon removal technologies hat can reverse climate change.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 5) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Donald Davis
Day/Time: Mon. 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Topic: The Economic History of New York City: A Focus on Immigration
This seminar will examine the economic history of New York City with a particular focus on the role of immigration in shaping that history. We will explore the theoretical foundations of immigration and the empirical economics literature on benefits and costs of immigration. We will also situate this within a broader view drawn from both economics and history on how the path of openness and limits to immigration have changed the city. Students will do research focused on particular immigrant groups and the neighborhoods they reside in. The course will require considerable reading and a paper. Assessment will be centered on the depth of your learning, as evidenced by your presentations and participation in discussions.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 6) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Pietro Tebaldi
Day/Time: Wed. 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Topic: Health Economics
The seminar will explore key topics in health economics and healthcare policy, with an emphasis on the U.S. system but in a comparative international perspective. The goal is to engage with both foundational and frontier research on how health is produced, financed, and distributed. Core sessions will cover the economics of health production and demand for healthcare services, the structure of health insurance markets, and the roles of adverse selection, moral hazard, and information frictions. Later meetings will turn to policy design questions in healthcare delivery and financing, such as risk adjustment, managed competition, provider incentives, and public versus private provision. Participants will read and discuss classic papers alongside recent empirical and policy-oriented work..

 

GU4911 (Sec. 7) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Tam Mai
Day/Time: Tues. 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Topic: The Geography and Economics of Segregation
Modern-day America remains highly segregated. Focusing on the U.S., this seminar will examine segregation, discrimination, and the interplay between them. The primary dimension of analysis is race and ethnicity. We will study spatial patterns of residential segregation, explore their causes, and evaluate their consequences for economic inequality and mobility. Special attention will be paid to discrimination and its role in producing and sustaining segregation. The seminar relies on close reading and discussion of selected books and academic articles. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, present selected readings and original work, and write a term paper on an agreed-upon topic. In addition, students will be required to take a field trip to a racially or ethnically distinctive neighborhood in New York City and write a report on it.

 

GU4911 (Sec. 8) MICROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: 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.

 

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GU4913 (Sec. 1) MACROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Matthew Gomez
Day/Time: Mon. 6:10pm – 8:00pm
Topic: Causes and Consequences of Inequality
This seminar will discuss the economic causes and consequences of inequality, with a particular focus on top income and wealth inequality. We will discuss the relative role of technology, financial markets, and institutions in driving the recent rise in inequality. 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.

 

GU4913 (Sec. 2) MACROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Jaewoo Lee 
Day/Time: Tues. 10:10am – 12:00pm
Topic: International Macroeconomics
The seminar will discuss international macroeconomic linkages, focusing on external imbalances, capital flows, and exchange rate dynamics. The format will combine lectures and class discussion led by student presentations of scholarly papers or real-world macroeconomic developments with significant international dimensions. In the latter case, students are expected to discuss real-world developments using a structured analytical framework. Requirement for the course will be a term paper on a topic in international macroeconomics, accompanied by an in-class presentation of the paper.

 

GU4913 (Sec. 3) MACROECONOMICS Seminar
Instructor: Instructor:  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.

 

GU4918 ECONOMETRICS Seminar
Instructor: Instructor: Thomas Piskula
Day/Time: Wed. 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Topic: Time Series, Macroeconomics, and Financial Markets
This seminar focuses on time series analysis and its many variants. The applications considered will primarily be macroeconomic and finance topics. Most data in macroeconomics and finance are in time series or panel data form.  In the first half of the semester, the professor will introduce econometric methods that are used in finance and macroeconomics.  Students will be exposed to various techniques including ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) models, ARCH (autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) models, cointegration, VAR (vector autoregression), and VECM (vector error correction model).  Additional topics include structural VAR models, TAR (threshold autoregressive models), factor models, IRFs (impulse response functions) and FEVD (forecast error variance decomposition).
The Great Recession of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the current government policy situation illustrate the need for an understanding of the links between movements and volatility in financial markets and fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates.  In this seminar, we will review empirical papers that examine these links.  We will study models of macroeconomic series and their forecasts as well as their predictive power on equity and fixed income markets.  We will also consider the reverse direction of causality and prediction, from financial markets to the real economy.  Students will learn how to conduct, and how to critique, empirical studies in applied time series econometrics.  Students are expected to choose a topic, to be approved by the professor, and write a paper using econometric methods discussed in the seminar.