General Education

• Core 1:
  • An important mission of SUA is to foster global citizenship and towards that end Core 100 will introduce you to a sampling of texts from ancient India, China and Greece. The idea is to encounter diverse world views; for you to allow your mind to be open to new ideas, foster original thought and creativity while thinking about these diverse, unfamiliar texts by figuring out how to meaningfully engage with them today: Are they relevant? What do they mean? Will they help me develop a stronger Self? How will they help the community I will be a part of? These are but some questions you might want to ask as you encounter readings in this class. You will use ideas encountered in at least one of these original texts to re-imagine an a contemporary issue of your choosing:

Economics Courses

• Principles of Economics
  • This course introduces students to fundamental forces underlying the economic world. It has two parts: the first part consists of the Microeconomics section, and the second part is the Macroeconomics section. In the Microeconomics part of the course we study the institution of markets- what they do, how they impact daily lives, and how are we to think about their outcomes. We also study situations where markets are harmful to society and discuss ways to improve market outcomes. In the Macroeconomics section the focus is on understand the aggregate economy by studying some very commonly used aggregate measures of economic activity. We further focus on why business cycles occur, the causes underlying inflation and the role of government in stabilizing the economy.

• Microeconomics

• Public Economics
  • We start the course with by laying out a general theoretical and empirical framework for evaluating public economic issues and government interventions, to see whether government policies aimed to improve the material standards of the less fortunate have been successful. Next, we consider measures of public policy goals of economic efficiency and economic equity. Specifically, we critically examine various measures of poverty and inequality. We further delve into issues of market failures such as asymmetric information in the health insurance market, and understand how this impacts access in such markets, discussing the role of government in markets with asymmetric information. We also study public education, and higher education, understand their roles in society and ask how current systems of education are doing in terms of their proposed goals. Next we turn to how governments can shape incentives of the players involved to better the existing outcomes of the current systems. We end the class with some lessons from behavioral economics in terms of shaping behaviors in public policy arenas.
  • Sample of student work from Public Economics, Fall 2020:
    • Vibhu Walia, then a junior, used the tools learnt in this class to examine if alcohol taxes implemented at local levels of government in India were impacting road safety as measured in the number of observed highway accidents.

• Environmental Economics