This course develops several simple models for thinking about the determinants of variables like aggregate employment, unemployment, investment, consumption, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates and the balance of trade. The framework is used to address issues such as: what is the role of saving in determining the long run wealth of the country; what is the role of money in accounting for inflation; what are the factors accounting for the recurrent fluctuations in employment and output called the business cycle; what factors account for fluctuations in the US dollar; what risks, if any, do the high US government deficits and large U.S. international deficits pose for the health of the US economy. Particular attention in Fall 2009 will be given to the causes of and solutions to the U. S. financial market meltdown of 2008-09 and the global economic crisis of 2009.
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The course examines the economic development of the United States between independence and the Civil War. It focuses on both long-term economic trends (like settlement of the west, development of agricultural technology) and the economic causes and consequences of particular events (like slavery or the Civil War).
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The course examines the economic development of the United States since the Civil War to the present. It focuses on both long-term economic trends (like technological advance and industrialization) and the economic causes and consequences of particular events (like the Great Depression).
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This course examines the process of economic growth and social change in Europe between 1750 and 1900. We will study the origins of the Industrial Revolution and its diffusion throughout the continent with a focus on changes within and across sectors and the role of technology, organisational and institutional change, as well as the impact of economic development on social structure and standards of living. We will also analyse the pattern of integration and disintegration of the economy at the national and European level. The long-run approach will be framed by the question what historical experience can teach us about modern economic questions and about the theoretical and empirical tools we use to understand them.
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This course explores how economists translate intuitions about decision making under risk and uncertainty into rigorous, tractable models. It illustrates how these models help us understand important aspects of economic phenomena such as investment in financial assets, insurance, information acquisition, intertemporal allocation of resources, etc. We shall also point out some shortcomings of `standard' models of choice under risk and uncertainty, and briefly examine proposed extensions that overcome them.
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An important practical objective of empirical economic research is to predict the consequences of alternative public policies. Economists combine data with assumptions to draw conclusions about policy impacts. The strength and credibility of these conclusions depend on the data and assumptions brought to bear, as well as on the analytical methods used. This course will study basic methodological problems in policy analysis and examine how economists perform policy analysis in practice. The methodological discussion will place special emphasis on problems of extrapolation that arise whenever one attempts to evaluate policies that differ from the status quo. The discussion of practice will examine actual research analyzing a range of policy questions.
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This course introduces the student to the economic analysis of the market for human resources: The Labor Market. After a brief introduction we will analyze the determinants of Labor Supply and Labor Demand followed by discussion of Labor Market Equilibrium. The acquisition of Human Capital (overall skill level of a person) plays a major role in modern societies. We will outline the basic theory of Human Capital formation with an application to education. After reviewing Signaling as an alternative reason for the acquisition of educational degrees the course introduces Compensating Differentials as the basis for occupational choice. We then examine worker mobility with an emphasis on geographic mobility (Immigration). In what follows we will document the large change in the Wage Structure and the ensuing increase in income inequality that the U.S. has experienced in the recent decades and will also describe the evolution of gender and racial differences in wages. The course closes with an economic analysis of Unemployment.
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This course applies economic analysis to family issues, broadly defined. These issues include marriage and cohabitation (hetero and homosexual), children (including reproductive technology and adoption), divorce, sexual behavior (including adultery), abortion, and gender reassignment. These phenomena will be modeled as the outcomes of rational-choice processes, with hypotheses concerning these choices evaluated in the context of relevant empirical evidence. Special attention will be focused on public policies influencing 'family' decisions.
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This course deals with the economics of colleges and universities. This course applies economic theory and econometric techniques in analyzing selected topics relating to the economics of higher education. Topics include financial and other returns to higher education investments, pricing and need-based/merit-based aid discounts, peer effects, productivity measures, ethical dimensions to economic analysis, etc
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Despite economic principles praise the power and efficiency of competitive markets, we do not live in such a perfect world. Many aspects our lives are affected by government regulation and antitrust. This course will take you to an economic world with the presence of the government. We will use microeconomic theory to illustrate problems associating with imperfect competition resulted from certain firm behavior and market structures. We will then discuss the economic rationale of antitrust regulations as well as efforts made by governmental agencies to pursue a more competitive environment in various industries. In addition, we will study important antitrust cases to supplement the economic theories.
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This is a first course in corporate finance. The course is designed to introduce students to the concepts and techniques necessary to analyze and implement optimal investment decisions. The course covers the effect of time and uncertainty on decision making. Topics include discounting techniques and applications, stock and bond valuation, asset pricing models, diversification and portfolio choice, capital budgeting, capital structure decisions and basic option theory. If time permits, additional topics may be introduced.
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North Americans may think of the Caribbean as a vacationerÂs haven of beaches and palm trees. But the region has a long, painful, and complex historyÂand it has produced, since the middle of the 20th century, a distinguished and richly varied literature, including two winners of the Nobel Prize, Derek Walcott and V. Naipaul. This literary outpouring began in the 1930s and continues to the present day, despite the disillusioning realities of the postcolonial era. This class will introduce you to some of the best English-language Caribbean writers and to the cultural conflictsÂconcerning race, colonialism, language, and identityÂthat inform their work.
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Most of us like to travel or would like to travel. Some of us get to travel, and some of us have even traveled to get to the US as immigrants or as international students. But all of us can travel through travel writing. In this course, we will trace the history and development of travel writing from the records of early explorers like Marco Polo to the heyday of British travel writing in the 1930Âs by authors like Robert Byron and to the popular travel writing of today. We will also explore issues of how journeys affect the traveler as well as how they affect the places and people of travel destinations.
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This course is intended to help students improve their writing and use that writing to gain a deeper understanding of ethical decision-making. Students will learn techniques for writing effective narrative, reflective, persuasive, and research essays. These techniques include the effective use of specific details to engage and persuade readers, methods of organization that enable readers to follow your line of thinking easily, and strategies for editing sentences for clarity and conciseness. For the research essay, each student will be able to choose an ethics-related topic from fields including science, medicine, law, politics, sports, journalism, religion, engineering, business and others.
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An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other members poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the Anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students participation, the more they will learn from the course.
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A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.
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A reading and writing course in the personal essay. Students will read widely in the genre of the personal essay, and gain exposure to larger world of creative nonfiction, including texts in memoir, public diaries and journals, nature and travel writing,lyric essays, and creative cultural criticism. Students will also consider English prose style and how it works both grammatically and artfully. Among the subjects taken up are phrase, syntax, diction, figures of speech,irony, and rhythm.
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What happened? Who am I? Who did it? And how do narratives help us answer these questions? Do the activities of interpretation and discovery only repeat the very puzzles they attempt to solve? Is there any innocent re-telling or detection? From short stories to long novels, from stories of growth to tales of crime, from early 19th-century England to late 20th-century America, these are some of the questions that preoccupy literary writers. In this course we will explore the various ways writers create and resolve mysteries about identity through the technique of narrative; and we will consider the complicated relationships between discovery and guilt, action and narration, crime and detection. Along the way, we will consider examples drawn from one of the most dominant forms of narrative in contemporary culture: film.
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What spooks America? From the Puritan Âcity upon a Hill, to Tom PaineÂs Common Sense, to EmersonÂs American Adam, America was imagined as a New World paradise, a place to begin the world anew. And yet, from the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, to the origins of the American Gothic in the Age of Reason, to MelvilleÂs Moby Dick, American literature has been haunted by fantasies of terror, sin, and violence. Why? This course will seek to answer this question. Focusing on a selection of imaginative writings, including origin stories, poems, novels, and a slave narrative, we shall seek to identify and understand the significance of the terrorsÂof the savage, the dark other, the body, the passions, nature, mixture, blood violence, authoritarian power, and apocalypseÂthat continue to haunt and spook the origins and development of American literature. Students will be encouraged to draw connections between past American fantasies and fears and contemporary popular culture and politics, from classic American films like HitchcockÂs Psycho to Crash, from American blues and jazz to Bruce SpringsteenÂs Born in the U.S.A, from Mc Carthyism and the Cold War to and the war on terror.
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This course will approach its central questionÂhow literary traditions are created and developed over timeÂby way of the Bible, the single most important source of themes and stories in Western culture. We will concentrate on a few books of great literary interest: Genesis, Exodus, the Song of Songs, the short stories of Ruth and Jonah, and the Gospels. Other readings will include a wide selection of poems and a few stories inspired by these books; two modern novels; and a distinguished critical study that reads the Bible itself as if it were a novel. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles rereads Scripture with a view to understanding the Âcharacter development of its central figure. Anita DiamantÂs The Red Tent fictionalizes the saga of JacobÂs family from Genesis in novelistic terms, while Toni MorrisonÂs Beloved masterfully fuses two biblical paradigms, the Exodus and the sacrifice of the firstborn, lending great power to her narrative of African-American slavery.
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Students will have the opportunity to enhance their writing skills through the critical reading and writing of creative nonfiction. The course will be especially interesting to writers who want to experiment with voice, context, concept, and point of view. The class will be conducted as a workshop, with each student maintaining a portfolio of written pieces. Class time will be devoted to discussion, writing instruction, and sharing of work. Depending on individual interests and needs, students will set goals for the quarter and, in frequent conferences with the instructor and other students, work towards meeting those goals. Revisions are encouraged.
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The Video Essay: Writing with Images and Sound. This course in advanced creative nonfiction focuses on applying literary techniques to the composition of short multimedia essays. Like its print counterpart, the video essay is an attempt to see what one thinks about something. The video essay may engage with fact, but tends to be less self-assured than documentary. Rather, the video essay, writes Phillip Lopate, wears confusion proudly as it gropes toward truth. Agnes Varda, the poetic French filmmaker who coined the term cinécriture, or film writing, best described the promise of the form when noting that, for her, writing meant more than simply wording a script. Choosing images, designing sound  these, too, were part of that process. This course explores the many ways in which writing in the video essay formÂwriting for viewers and listeners rather than readersÂdiffers from print. We will seek to understand how sound and image make a direct appeal to the senses, as well as learn how the writerÂs voice collaborates with audio and visual elements. Readings and screenings include George Orwell, Joan Didion, Don Delillo, Ross McElwee, Agnes Varda, and Chris Marker.
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The novel as descendant of the epic has often been an agent of nation and convention building. But the form also contains the anti-thesis of that, the ability to subvert. Subversion in this case is not a nihilistic impulse, but rather a process of constructing an alternate history, or state, or community of ideas. Carnival, as theorized by Bakhtin, will guide our reading, as will other short readings on the body and narrative like Elaine Scarry and Frazier. We will ask ourselves important questions about possibility, aesthetics and even the functions of literature as it pertains to the novel. Given that most of our education would have been in the North American form, we will read six short novels from the US, Scandinavia, Morocco, China/Tibet, and Zimbabwe to see what these situations and realities can reveal about the form of narrative, subversion and its dialogue with the world.
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Even early in his career, Shakespeare experimented with a wide array of genres as he distinguished himself among his contemporaries in 1590s England. While on stage he was instrumental in developing and/or rethinking the genres of tragedy, comedy, and history, in print he stretched the capacities of both narrative and lyric poetic traditions. The purpose of this class is to get a sense of the diversity of ShakespeareÂs early work as it formulated the many concerns, insights, obsessions, and linguistic techniques that would come to characterize him as a distinctive and even legendary voice of his age. We will begin in the realms of tragedy and comedy as we observe Shakespeare transition from imitator to innovator, then move to the sonnets where nearly all of the poetÂs ideas may be seen in microcosm. The second half of the class will examine ShakespeareÂs magnificent history cycle (the second ÂHenriadÂ), which traces the intersections of power, legitimacy, and theater through the reigns of Richard II to Henry V.
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Romantic poets radically reinvented the sense of time for the modern era. From WordsworthÂs Âspots of time to BlakeÂs prophecies and KeatsÂs lyrical suspensions, Romantic poetry presents an impressive range of conceptions of time that still inform the way we think about ourselves and our places in the world today. We will trace the ways in which these conceptions shape the advent of modernity in relation to such issues as periodization, progress, and posterity, as well as to the shadows of the French revolution, the writings on the Âspirit of the age, and the acceleration of history visible when Wordsworth refers to the Âgreat national events which are daily taking place. We will consider what roles poetic traditions, forms, and rhythmic movements play in shaping a sense of time, enabling us to explore also the ways in which poetry imagines history at a moment when the sense of flux and the fleeting present made that imagining all but elusive.
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