Economics Department Learning Goals
Learning goals for majors and minors
To learn and be able to communicate in written and oral form about
• How markets function
• How and why markets sometimes achieve and sometimes fail to achieve fundamental goals including economic efficiency and welfare
• The basis for competing ideas about economic policies
• How to apply economic concepts beyond market settings
• How to analyze economic data
• Broad trends in the U.S. and world economies
To apply the tools of economics after graduation in solving problems on the job, in the societal/policy arena and in daily life.
Goals in specific core economics classes
The economics major requires that all students complete five core courses. The department has adopted these learning outcomes for those five courses.
On successful completion of Econ 150: Introduction to Economics, students should understand the following concepts and be able to use them to frame and/or solve economic problems
• Opportunity cost and marginal analysis
• Determinants of supply and demand, and how supply and demand interact to determine market outcomes
• Elasticity and how to calculate it
• Economic efficiency, consumer surplus, producer surplus and deadweight loss
• Effects of taxes, subsidies, price ceilings/floors
• Causes of market failure to achieve efficiency
• Comparative advantage and gains from trade
• How to measure GDP, real GDP, inflation, and unemployment
• Causes of and trends in long-run economic growth
• Causes of short-run macroeconomic fluctuations
• Causes of inflation
• How monetary and fiscal policy work
On successful completion of Econ 201: Applied Econometrics, students should:
• Understand, and be able to work with, least squares multiple regression.
• Understand the concept of statistical significance and be able to distinguish this from economic importance.
• Understand that correlation is not causation, and have resources for assessing whether a statistical relationship may reflect causality.
• Understand the various threats to the validity of the classical linear regression model and know how to perform appropriate tests for detecting such threats.
• Understand the issues of model specification, including the requirement that a meaningful statistical model must be grounded in theory or prior knowledge.
• Be able to work with logarithmic or quadratic specifications, dummy variables and interaction terms as appropriate.
• Have a demonstrated ability to assemble a suitable data set (with some help) and to apply regression analysis to answer an empirical question of interest.
• Have an understanding of some additional econometric techniques and issues – for example, time-series models, panel-data models, two-stage least squares or models for limited dependent variables.
On successful completion of Econ 205: Intermediate Microeconomics I and Econ 206: Intermediate Microeconomics II, students should have learned the following concepts and be able to use them to frame and/or solve economic problems
• Indifference curves and utility functions in conjunction with budget constraints in analyzing consumers’ choices
• Income and substitution effects
• Production functions and isoquant curves in analyzing firms’ behavior
• The measurement of fixed costs, variable costs, total costs and marginal costs and how they influence firms’ decisions
• How firms’ decisions determine prices and outputs in different market settings including perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly and mopsony.
• Strategic decisions and Nash Equilibrium
• The behavior of factor markets
• Risk preferences
• Present discounted value
• Causes of market failure to achieve efficiency due to asymmetric information, externalities and public goods
On successful completion of Econ 207: Intermediate Macroeconomics, student should understand and/or be able to apply the following concepts and tools to examine these macroeconomic problems:
• The measurement of GDP, aggregate prices, and unemployment, and the distinction between the short-run and long-run
• The circular flow of income and expenditure
• Nominal wage and price rigidities
• Equilibrium in the goods and services market and the market for loanable funds
• The quantity theory of money and what determines the demand for money
• The relationship between money and inflation, and the social costs of inflation
• The labor market and theoretical explanations of unemployment
• The relationship between capital accumulation, population growth, technology and long-run economic growth using aggregate production functions
• Aggregate demand and aggregate supply, and the business cycle
• The IS-LM model and its predictions for fiscal and monetary policy
• Application of macroeconomic theory to the short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment
• Debt and government budget dynamics
• The evolution of financial systems
(Adopted Spring 2011.)