Syllabus

This course has two objectives. The first is to introduce students to building models of how people and firms make decisions. These models can be used to study a number of applications. Models require some basic calculus and it is also useful to learn how to use numerical tools to solve them. The second objective is to introduce students to market imperfections which justify government intervention as well as behavioral theories which enrich traditional models of economic behavior.

See ZoneCours for evaluation methods and other instructions such other references which complement the material here.

Slack

A slack channel has been set up for class communication and other interactions. Make sure to click on the link above and download the app.

We will use Zoom for class meetings. The link for each session is on ZoneCours.

Programming

Python has rapidly become one of the key languages to start learning how to program, as this graph shows.

Google has set up a very nice platform called Google collab to work with Python using Notebooks. It only requires that you have a google drive account. Please setup one and check it out.

See this notebook to familiarize yourself with the Python environment. For each lecture, you will see an icon like this which you can click on to open up the notebook in Google colab.