Labor Economics Courses

ECON 771: Advanced Labor Economics: Theory and Evidence
Modern analytical and quantitative labor economics. Labor supply decisions of individuals and households; human capital models and the distribution of income. Demand for labor; marginal productivity theory, imperfect information and screening. Interaction of labor demand and supply; unemployment; relative and absolute wages; macroeconomic aspects of the labor market.

ECON 772: Advanced Labor Economics II
Quantitative methods of program evaluation; empirical studies of government programs such as employment training and underemployment insurance. Models of job search and job matching with empirical applications. Household formation; inter-generational mobility; intra-household bargaining.

Related Course

ECON 626: Empirical Microeconomics
Empirical techniques that are particularly valuable in the analysis of microeconomic data. Topics include panel data, nonlinear optimization, limited dependent variables, truncated, censored and selected samples, the analysis of natural experiments, and quantile regression.

Field Requirements in Labor Economics

Major field: ECON 771 and 772, and one other course. The third course could be ECON 626, ECON 751 (public finance) or another course chosen in consultation with the labor faculty.

Average grade of B+ or better in courses. Field paper: proposal due by April 15 of second year as part of coursework in 772. First version of paper due February 1 of third year. If the first version does not pass the field requirement, the student will be notified by February 15 and the second (final) version will be due April 20.

The field paper will be judged based on the quality of the value added by the student submitting the paper. Ideally the paper will become a dissertation chapter for those who choose Labor as their major field. The faculty recognizes, however, that some good ideas do not work out well enough to become part of a dissertation. In such a situation, we will encourage a student to finish up the field paper as early as possible so that the student can begin working on something more promising.

Minor field: ECON 771 and 772. Average grade of B+ or better in courses.

back to previous page