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Develops a framework for evidence-based decision making in the context of policy and management. It is a case-based curriculum, where students learn cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis and how to write and present their findings in various formats.

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Provides an understanding of basic economic principles, beginning with the core concepts of demand and supply, markets, and competition. It helps understand market failures and apply economic principles to policy problems such as the concentration of economic power and resources, social inequality, and protecting the environment. Throughout, the course explicitly examines the role of government and the tools available to policy-makers to influence markets.

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Introduces students to several key elements of management in the public sector. Based in large part on the case method, the course explores such topics as budgeting, contracting out to nonprofit and for-profit agencies for service delivery, intergovernmental relations, accountability and performance-based management, strategic management, and leadership.

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Lab is an applied policy-analysis experience in which students work together in teams of four or five to resolve a policy issue for a public or nonprofit decision-maker. Over the course of the semester, students work on two different issues for different clients. At the end of each round, the client and two faculty members are briefed in an interactive setting, the team’s performance is assessed in terms of its analytic strength and policy relevance, and the team then prepares written analysis in response to the feedback. Students labor under realistic constraints of limited data, time, and resources to provide rigorous analysis to clients with decision-making responsibility. The goal is to build strong analytic skills and research logic in the service of rational decision-making.

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This advanced seminar provides an opportunity to design and execute an independent analytic project. The project—the professional decision report (PDR)—is an intensive, integrative experience that demonstrates students’ professional abilities, as well as the analytic skills they have acquired through graduate study. PDRs must address a policy or management issue facing a client, usually a government official or nonprofit executive, of the student's choosing. The final document should exhibit both a facility with technical and formal skills of analysis and an understanding of the political and operational dimensions that condition policy and management responses.

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Deals with how governments tax and spend. Students become familiar with the theoretical, empirical, and practical tools and methods used to create and analyze government budgets, as well as the flow of public resources. The course examines public revenues and expenditures within the context of fiscal federalism, in addition to budgeting and resource management and the social, economic, and political forces that shape the fiscal environment within which governments (particularly state and local governments) operate.

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Students will learn to write a “policy memo” for a policy maker at the city, state, or federal level. We will read classics on policy making, texts on extraordinary and ordinary fiscal and monetary policies, and up-to-date U.S. government documents pertaining to reopening the economy during the pandemic. We will take a deep dive into labor market dynamics. The class will understand economists’ decision-making about how to re-open the economy. We especially concentrate on how economists depend on virologists to figure out how to open the economy safely, with the least expense, and extracting the most productivity possible. In the first couple of days the students will decide what policy memo they want to write by the end of the course. They will understand their role as economist. They will understand the rudiments of cost - benefit analysis and the students will know how to manipulate excel spreadsheets.

The field of Microeconomics has been dominated by the neoclassical approach. This course offers an alternative perspective to study the behaviors of individuals and firms. Instead of methodological individualism, we focus more on coordinations among individuals and firms to understand why sometimes coordination fails and what institutions can be designed to assist coordination success.

The class explores, through a historical and comparative perspective, the connection between leading trends of economic theory in the 20th century and applied policy-making. Through this course students acquire a thorough understanding of the main schools in the 20th century history of political economy. Chiefly, students develop critical tools to appreciate the importance of economic rationales and academic enterprises in the making of the world we inhabit.

This course engages the core assumptions, systems, and logics that give rise to the global and provides a historically and theoretically informed basis for the further study and practice of international affairs. The terms "global" and "globalization" are relative linguistic newcomers for signifying interrelated processes that span cultures and scales. Though all movement of peoples from the earliest times can be construed as having a global effect in the most literal sense, and empires have spanned distances and brought peoples into contact, the most common referent of the term globalization concerns late 20th and early 21st century socio-economic processes. Our task in this class is to explore the key trajectories of state and market formation from which our present era has emerged, replete with paradoxes and promises. We trace how the global today unfolds from the legacies of colonialism, the nation-state system, and capitalism and manifests itself in our changing relation to space and time. These legacies are our ineluctable inheritance, our daily reality, and the material we must work with and confront, especially for students and practitioners of international affairs.