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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
The Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model is an important tool for applied policy work. CGE models are the primary tool for many government organizations when evaluating policy alternatives and are also used extensively by various NGO's when deciding aid and policy recommendations. The great advantage of these models is that they capture the general equilibrium feedback effects of policy proposals on various sectors of the economy. This is of great importance to applied work, as this allows the identification of the winners and losers from potential policies. The class will begin with a general overview of CGE models. This overview will be rigorous and mathematical. This course will use the free programming packages GAMS and MPSGE to implement various CGE models using real world data. While no previous computer experience is required, some familiarity with Excel is recommended. During the latter part of the course, students will create a CGE model for a country of their choice and conduct policy experiments using their model. Interested students could continue this project as a potential thesis topic.
Prerequisite:
Mathematics 105, Economics 251
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3.00 Credits
This course will provide students with an understanding of how economists think about and analyze various urban policy issues around the world. Those interested in doing policy work on urban issues and/or economic development in the future will find this course useful. We will explore the structure of cities and the urban policy issues in both the US and developing countries. We will cover topics including city size and growth, land use regulation, property rights, housing, public goods and education, environment and energy, transportation and infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and migration and segregation. Students will learn the underlying economic theory and how to empirically examine urban policy questions using data. The course includes textbook like treatment of urban topics and examination of empirical evidence using journal articles. Examples will equally be drawn from the US and developing country cases.
Prerequisite:
ECON 251 and ECON 255
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3.00 Credits
Designing and implementing effective national strategies to promote inclusive economic growth can require difficult policy reforms, sometimes with adverse short-term impacts for vulnerable groups within society. Social safety nets provide a pro-poor policy instrument that can balance trade and labor market reform, fiscal adjustments (such as reduced general subsidies) and other economic policies aimed at enabling better market performance. In addition, social safety nets help the poor to cope with shocks to their livelihoods, promoting resilience, human capital development and sometimes high-return risk-taking. This tutorial will offer students the opportunity to explore the role of social safety nets in promoting inclusive economic growth, drawing on case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The first part of the tutorial will define social safety nets within the broader context of social protection, examining the diversity of instruments and their linkages to economic growth. The second part will delve more deeply into the design and implementation of effective interventions, assessing program choice, affordability, targeting, incentives and other issues. The third part will analyze the role of social safety nets in supporting economic growth strategies, drawing on international lessons of experience.
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3.00 Credits
This tutorial will address the conceptual and theoretical issues that confront policy makers when they face policy challenges that are likely to emerge only over the coming years and that have important budgetary implications. It will explore the strategies and approaches that a number of countries have attempted to develop to bring the long-term into their current policy and budgetary planning processes. Students will be exposed to different long-term challenges that have important budgetary implications, including aging populations, health care, climate change, energy and infrastructure, and water. The course will consider the specific policy challenges that arise for each and the ways in which different industrial and emerging market countries are addressing them.
Prerequisite:
Permission of the instructor for undergraduates
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3.00 Credits
This tutorial will explore the role of international financial institutions in the global economic and financial system, their relations with members, and proposals for how they might be reformed. The focus will be principally on the International Monetary Fund and to a lesser extent the World Bank, but consideration also may be given to the regional development banks, Bank for International Settlements, the Financial Stability Forum, and the Paris Club used for official debt renegotiations. Topics and readings will focus on such issues as: the roles and governance reform of the IMF and World Bank; relations between the two institutions and their relations with other institutions of international finance and governance; lessons from their performance in international crises from the Asian crises of 1997 through the crisis that started in 2007; and initiatives of the Fund and Bank in the global adjustment process, financial system stability (including money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism), public and private sector governance, lending programs, the management of international reserves, and provision of advice to members. Participants will meet in pairs with the faculty member. Each week, one student will prepare a policy paper and submit the paper to the professor and to the other student in advance of the meeting. During the meeting, the student who has written the paper will present an argument, evidence, and conclusions. The other student will provide a detailed critique of the paper based on concepts and evidence from the readings. The professor will join the discussion after each participant has presented and ask questions that highlight or illustrate critical points.
Prerequisite:
Intended for CDE Fellows; undergraduate enrollment limited, and only with permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
In this course, each Fellow carries out an individual research study on a topic in which he or she has particular interest, usually related to one of the three seminars. The approach and results of the study are reported in a major paper. Research studies are analytical rather than descriptive and in nearly all cases include quantitative analyses. Often the topic is a specific policy problem in a Fellow's own country.
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3.00 Credits
Ancient Celtic texts--Irish and Welsh--associate the poet with powerful magic--shape-shifting, access to the other-world, and visions of transcendent authority and truth. Plato, in his famous condemnation of poetry in The Republic, also associates poetry with magic, but with magic as con game or sleight-of-hand trick. This course will use Plato and the Celtic texts to establish a theoretical framework for reading and interpreting the representation of poetry and magic in a variety of literary works from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The goal of the course is to develop effective reading and writing strategies for works of different genres and time periods. Reading will include Chaucer's Friar's Tale (where the poet-figure is a devil); Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (where the poet-figure sells his soul to the devil for magical power); Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (where fairies and magic represent the positive power of the imagination); and short poems by Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats.
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3.00 Credits
The idea of a distinct category of individuals identified as "biracial," "multiracial," or "mixed-race" has become increasingly prominent over the past few decades, despite the inescapable fact that the existence of children of interracial couples is by no means new. Indeed, historically speaking, notions of "racial purity" are a relatively recent invention--what might now be called "race-mixing" is older than the concept of "race" itself. Why, then, has the figure of the mixed-race person been receiving so much attention? Why is this figure imagined as somehow novel or unprecedented? Is there something different about the contemporary social experience of children of interracial couples? Why do people who do not share this experience take so much interest in it? Our pursuit of these questions will take us back to earlier periods in U.S. history, and to different figures appearing at the borders of established racial categories, such as the "tragic mulatta" or the "passing" figure. Most of our readings will be drawn from African American literature and works by other writers of color, but you should also expect a substantial amount of scholarly writing on theories and histories of race. These readings will lead to some highly charged discussions--which will not always end comfortably, or with everyone in agreement. Because this course is writing-intensive, we'll spend significant time developing writing skills, with an emphasis on collaborative learning.
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3.00 Credits
We complain in order to voice our dissatisfaction with things as they are. It is a rhetorical form that seems to demand change or, at minimum, acknowledgement. As a genre, however, the complaint and its companions, the rant and the grievance, often speak to deaf ears: a distant and uncaring beloved; a bureaucracy that may not recognize one's humanity; abstractions, systems, and machines. In literary form, complaints introduce questions such as: What is the relationship between literary complaints and legal ones? What effects can such expressions have on social and political realities? Is it necessary that someone hear our dissatisfaction, or might the simple act of voicing complaint relieve our frustrations? We will explore texts that engage thematically or formally with the genres of the complaint, the rant, and the grievance, including complaint poems; stories that thematize repetition, frustration, and disillusionment; and political forms such as the manifesto. We will read writers including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Herman Melville, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Willa Cather, Valerie Solanas, David Wojnarowicz, and Jamaica Kincaid; we will also consider some alternative and collective forms, such as the harmonized frustrations of the Helsinki Complaints Choir.
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3.00 Credits
It's been argued that American writers don't know how to tell a happy love story. Instead of ending a tale with the payoff of a wedding, or writing about the joys of family life, they obsess over loneliness, death, and escape from civilization. In this class, we will collectively test and revamp that thesis, constructing an informal history of love over a century of American imaginings. What is the symbolic value of marriage in a country with a stated aim to achieve a more perfect union (a question we'll see played out in the film )? How do some of our great authors try to convey the nature of desire? What, for instance, makes Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Poe's dark-eyed heroine in "Ligeia," so alluring? And we'll consider extramarital forms of attachment, from the ties that bind "frenemies" (like Chillingworth and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter) to the tender care people lavish on the things they collect (as in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton).
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