The first part of the course covers both some key topics in Advance Microeconomics such as choice under uncertainty (essential for financial decisions) and contract theory (with labor market effects) and some of the strategies that firms with market power may adopt in order to maximize the returns on business investments. The latter topics range from pricing decisions (consumers’ discrimination, bundling and tie-in-sales), no-price competition (product differentiation), anti-competitive behaviour (collusion, mergers) and antitrust economics.

In the second part the course provides an introduction to applied econometrics. The goal is to develop the skills necessary to conduct empirical research in economics. No previous knowledge of econometrics is assumed. It will be helpful if one has a good background in statistics, probability theory and matrix algebra. This course covers basic techniques in quantitative economic analysis. It introduces students to widely-used procedures for regression analysis, and provides intuitive, applied, and formal foundations for regression methods. The course covers model assumptions and techniques for addressing violations of those assumptions (e.g., heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, multicollinearity), as well as issues of model specification, functional forms, endogeneity and time-series data.