Prelims Microeconomics

Scheduling: We meet in Weeks 2--6 and 8, on Thursday afternoons, in my office (FB Attic Room 1). A further tutorial will be held in in Week 1 of Hilary. James will hold the tutorials in Weeks 2--4, and Luke in the other weeks. At least initially, we shall meet in the following groups:

• • 14:00--15:20: Ananya, Mipham, Peter

  • 15:30--16:50: Maya, Matias, Wes

  • 17:00--18:20: Michal, Rhidian

We shall meet in person so long as circumstances permit. Wear a mask, as per the University's guidelines, and ensure that you have appropriately warm clothing -- the room will be very well ventilated.

If at any stage you are required to self-isolate, please contact me and Luke immediately, so that we can make arrangements to hold your tutorials online. This may necessitate a change in the composition of the tutorial groups -- please therefore keep your entire Thursday afternoons (from 2pm onwards) free of other commitments.

Problem sets: Each week -- no later than Tuesday evening -- I shall assign a subset of the problems from the tutorial worksheets posted on the course Canvas page. These must be submitted to your shared OneDrive folder, by 5pm on Tuesday before the tutorial.

Submit your work as a single pdf file, with the naming scheme: surname_term_week.pdf, where term is MT, HT or TT as appropriate, and week refers to the number of the week in which the tutorial is to be held. Typewritten work (if done e.g. in MS Word) should be converted to pdf prior to submission; handwritten work must be scanned to produce a pdf. or instructions on how to do this effectively using a smartphone (producing a file with a reasonably small size), see this guidance produced by my colleague, Kevin Sheppard. You may also consider using Microsoft Lens to produce your scans, as recommended by the University

I shall also assign readings to supplement the lecture slides: these will be taken from the CORE textbook, The Economy, and J. M. Perloff (2014) Microeconomics with Calculus, 3rd ed. (Other editions are fine, but may have different sectioning.) The CORE book is available online here; enough hardcopies of both textbooks, for each of you to borrow simultaneously, are available from the Corpus Library. You may also find it helpful to consult the Maths Workbook that I sent you during the summer (also available here).

Format: While the classes will focus mostly on covering the solutions to the problem sets, I am very happy to discuss any questions you may have about the lecture material (and assigned readings). It would help if you could email me any questions that arise in advance of our meeting, so that I have a chance to think about them.

Exam: In addition to the material in this module contributing 1/3 of the questions in your Prelims Economics exam, a collection ('practice exam') covering this material will be held online in Week 0 of Hilary term.

Note: James will hold a Prelims Probability and Statistics tutorial in Week 7; details will be provided subsequently.

Tutorial 1 (Week 2)

Problems: Tutorial Sheet 1, Problems 1--4 and Question 7. [Additionally, think about Questions 1 and 2; we may discuss them in the tutorial if time permits]

Readings: The Economy, Units 1--2; Perloff Ch 1 ('Introduction'), Ch 7.1 ('Measuring Costs'), and Ch 10.4 (Subsection on 'Comparative Advantage' only)

Tutorial 2 (Week 3)

Problems: Tutorial Sheet 2, Problems 3, 4, 5, 6, 8. [Additionally, think about Questions 1 and 2]

Readings: The Economy, Unit 8; Perloff Ch 8 ('Competitive Firms and Markets'), Ch 9 ('Applications of the Competitive Model'), and optionally Ch 10 ('General Equilibrium and Economic Welfare')

Tutorial 3 (Week 4)

Problems: Tutorial Sheet 3, Problems 3, 4, 5, 6. [Additionally, think about Question 1]

Readings: Perloff Ch 6 ('Firms and Production'), Ch 7 ('Costs')

Luke Milsom will take the remaining tutorials for this course: please see his webpage for details of the work set for those.