Course Descriptions: Economics
- G 502 Managerial Economics (1.5 cr)
- This course teaches managers how to balance benefits and costs and efficiently allocate resources across tasks and over time. The curriculum offers foundational knowledge of market structure, outlines ways to interpret the impact on prices of enhanced competition and industry innovation, expands application of statistical knowledge, and defines rules-of-thumb for business management that expand profitability. Specific topics covered include regression analysis and decisions under uncertainty, present value and opportunity costs, supply and demand, cost structure and economies of scale, price elasticity and consumer valuation, and impacts from taxation and price controls.
- G 511 Microeconomics for Managers (1.5cr.) P: G502
- This course develops basic skills in analysis of industry and market structure, employment of game theory in the construction of competitive strategy, and determination of optimal prices for the sale of goods and services. Specific topics include oligopoly, antitrust regulation, price discrimination, product bundling, and predatory pricing. Students will gain advanced knowledge of how to use prices and market position to maintain an advantage over competitors that maximizes profits.
- G 512 Macroeconomics for Managers (1.5 cr.)
- An integrated curriculum that teaches students how to take inventory of the nation's economic position, understand the impact of government actors, and forecast political and economic variables important to the firm. Specific topics covered include national income accounting, determination of GDP and inflation, measurement of unemployment, impacts of fiscal and monetary policies, movement and term structure of interest rates, consequences of government debt, and exchange rates and their linkage to the balance of payments. Students leave the course with a fundamental understanding of the national assets that expand production capacity and national liabilities that stunt opportunity for economic growth.
- G 590 - Independent Study in Business Economics and Public Policy (cr. arr.)
- For advanced M.B.A. students engaged in special study projects. Course admission and project supervision is arranged through the M.B.A. Office and the student's faculty advisor.
- G 595 Country Analysis & International Management (1.5 cr.) P: G512
- More and more business is conducted outside of the United States. To assess opportunity in a foreign country, managers must have tools to forecast a country's political and economic performance. This course employs a case method curriculum that endows students with knowledge on how to measure national performance, identify a nation's economic policy strategy, and explain the logic of a strategy in terms of cultural and institutional context. Concepts from political economy and economic growth theory are blended to yield general insights that a manager can apply in analysis of any country. Foreign direct investment, economic reform and planning, regulation of market activity, and political risk are specific topics of focus. Countries of study include China, Japan, and the Russia. Students leave the course with appreciation of different ways to define and achieve national prosperity.
