Teaching

This course explores global healthcare, health outcomes, pharmaceutical research & development, and health insurance & markets. Students will apply health insurance theory to health care systems across the globe and read and discuss current literature on health phenomena and disease burdens in both developed and developing countries. We will investigate why people make the health decisions they do, how markets and policies shape those decisions, and how inequality emerges within and across health systems. Along the way, students will use economic tools to analyze real-world health behaviors, evaluate policy trade-offs, and understand the forces that drive global disparities in health.

We consider the economic problems and policies of poor countries, with attention to the concept and measurement of economic development; human capital investments over the life cycle; gender and household decision-making; land, labor, credit, and insurance markets; inequality and development; the role of institutions and the state; and debates over the effectiveness of foreign aid. Factors and constraints influencing economic decision-making, including market failures and potential strategies for their resolution, are a recurring theme.

This course introduces students to the analytical approaches and tools of the economics discipline, and how these are used to examine current issues and problems that arise in the functioning of economic systems. Microeconomic theories of consumption, production, and exchange provide much of the analytical framework that will be utilized, although we will also explore some relevant applications to the macroeconomy. A central feature of this course is the examination of markets and how they determine what is produced and how it is allocated. We also devote some attention to evaluating market outcomes, to thinking about remedies to resource allocation problems that markets cannot solve, and to thinking about the factors that determine long-run productive capacity and income potential.