Independent reading course. Full course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

This course examines the determinants of and linkages between market structure, firm conduct, and industrial performance. Some of the questions that will be addressed include: Why do some markets have many sellers while others have only few? How and why do different market structures give rise to different prices and outputs? In what ways can firms behave strategically so as to prevent entry or induce exit of rival firms? Under what circumstances can collusion be successful? Why do firms price discriminate? Why do firms advertise?

Health care poses many pressing questions: Why do we spend so much on health care? Does this spending actually produce better health? How do health care institutions function? What is the appropriate role of government? How are we to judge the efficiency and equity of health care policy? By applying economic analysis to health, health care, and health care markets, health economics provides insight into these questions. In the first section of this course, we will assess the role of health care in the economy and apply economic models to the production of health and health care.

This course uses economic models and tools to analyze environmental and natural resource problems such as climate change, air and water pollution, depletion of renewable and non-renewable resources, and land-use change. The frameworks studied include market failure due to externalities or public goods situations, the cost-effective allocation of pollution control, cost-benefit analysis, firm decision-making in response to regulations, and the management of renewable and non-renewable resources.

This course introduces the field of behavioral economics, which incorporates insights from psychology into economics with the aim of improving human welfare. Behavioral economics studies how individuals actually make decisions, which may deviate from the way “rational actors” are modeled in terms of making decisions in classical economics. Motivated by non-fiction readings and academic articles, we will use behavioral economic frameworks to characterize this actual decision-making and to explore its consequences for markets and for policy.

This course studies the labor market: forces that change how much people want to work, how easily they find a job, and the determinants of wages. We consider historic trends in the labor market, current conditions, and the role of public policy. We will focus particularly on sources of earnings inequality and changes in earnings and employment over booms and recessions and over workers’ lives.

Requisite: ECON 111 or ECON 111E. Limited to 35 students. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Dillon.

Independent reading course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

This course covers basic mathematical concepts that are essential in computer science, and then uses them to teach the theory of formal languages and machine models of languages. The notion of computability will be introduced in order to discuss undecidable problems. The topics covered include: regular, context-free and context-sensitive languages, finite state automata, Turing machines, decidability, and computational complexity. Offered in alternate years.

Requisite: None, although analytical aptitude is essential. Spring semester. The Department.

Independent reading course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

Computer systems are complex structures of multiple hardware and software components, with each component affecting the performance of every computation.  To measure and improve performance requires a full understanding of how a system's components interact and the unexpected ways that changes in one component may affect others.