Teaching

This foundational economics course provides a comprehensive introduction to both microeconomic and macroeconomic principles, exploring how individuals and societies make decisions under conditions of scarcity. Students examine core concepts including supply and demand, market structures, pricing mechanisms, comparative advantage, and the role of incentives in shaping economic behavior. The course emphasizes how economics applies to diverse aspects of everyday life—from dating and marriage to employment, crime, health, and environmental issues—while developing analytical skills through problem-solving and real-world applications. The second half of the course shifts to macroeconomic topics, investigating national and international economic phenomena such as GDP measurement, economic growth, business cycles, unemployment, inflation, fiscal policy, and monetary policy. 

Unique to the University of Dallas mission, the course also integrates Catholic Social Teaching throughout the semester, culminating in a dedicated section that frames economic principles through the lens of Catholic thought on economic life, human dignity, and social justice. Students engage with both classic texts like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Catholic Social Teaching to develop a well-rounded perspective on economics as both a social science and a discipline that intersects with ethics and human flourishing.

This intermediate-level course provides rigorous training in microeconomic theory, building on foundational principles to develop sophisticated analytical frameworks for understanding economic behavior. Students explore consumer theory in depth, examining utility maximization, budget constraints, indifference curves, and the derivation of demand functions through income and substitution effects. The course then transitions to the theory of the firm, analyzing production functions, cost minimization, profit maximization, and the relationship between short-run and long-run decisions. Through mathematical modeling and graphical analysis, students develop the technical skills necessary for advanced economic reasoning and problem-solving. The latter portion of the course examines market structures and industrial organization, comparing how firms behave under perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Students learn to analyze strategic interactions between firms, pricing decisions, market power, and efficiency outcomes across different competitive environments. 

While maintaining the rigorous analytical approach characteristic of intermediate microeconomics courses nationwide, the course also encourages students to situate economic analysis within the broader liberal arts context at the University of Dallas, considering how insights from philosophy, theology, and other disciplines inform both the questions economists ask and how societies should respond to economic insights about human behavior and market outcomes.

In this course, we examine family dynamics and demographic trends, focusing on marriage, fertility, and household decision-making through the lens of economic analysis. We will explore the economic forces that shape family formation and evaluate policy approaches designed to address the challenges families face today. Throughout our analysis, we'll consider the nature and purpose of the family as understood within the Catholic intellectual tradition, examining how Catholic Social Teaching provides a framework for understanding what social science reveals about human flourishing.

We critically evaluate family-related policies using tools of applied economic analysis and cutting-edge empirical techniques, with special attention to questions of causality and identification. The course integrates accessible readings from sociology, demography, and popular social science with rigorous economic research. Policy areas discussed include housing, taxation, the safety net, reproductive policies, childcare, and family leave as they relate to family formation and stability. Key themes include the evolution of American family structure, cultural and class divides in family formation, the economics of marriage markets and sexual behavior, the modern fertility crisis and demographic transitions, intergenerational mobility, and the role of technology in shaping family outcomes.

This course applies economic analysis to environmental challenges and energy markets, examining how economic incentives create environmental problems and evaluating policy approaches to address them. Students explore market failures including externalities, public goods, and the tragedy of the commons, while analyzing policy instruments such as carbon pricing, cap-and-trade systems, and regulatory approaches. The course emphasizes real-world applications through both contemporary case studies (such as the 2025 LA fires) and historical policy analysis (including the Clean Air and Water Acts), developing skills in cost-benefit analysis, valuation of environmental goods, and assessment of policy trade-offs. Special attention is given to Texas energy markets and their role in both state and national energy policy. 

The course examines the full spectrum of energy sources—from traditional fossil fuels to nuclear power and renewables—analyzing their economics, market structures, and policy implications. Students investigate how individuals, firms, and markets adapt to environmental challenges through technological innovation, behavioral changes, and regulatory responses. A unique component of the course integrates Catholic Social Teaching perspectives on environmental stewardship and economic development, encouraging students to balance St. Francis's call to care for creation with the pursuit of economic prosperity and energy abundance. The course culminates in original research where students either conduct a literature review on a broad environmental/energy question or design an original research proposal, preparing them to engage critically with environmental policy debates as informed citizens and potential contributors to the field.

This advanced undergraduate course provides rigorous training in both the theoretical foundations and empirical analysis of labor markets, with particular emphasis on how economists use cutting-edge research methods to answer questions of societal importance. The course examines the determinants of wages and employment through the lens of labor supply and demand theory, then applies these frameworks to analyze critical policy issues including minimum wage laws, earned income tax credits, unemployment insurance, and labor market regulations. Students develop proficiency in understanding natural experiments, randomized control trials, and regression analysis by studying how professional economists identify causal relationships in labor market data. Topics span human capital investment and education returns, unemployment dynamics and job search, geographic and occupational mobility, immigration economics, labor unions, and discrimination in hiring and wages. 

A distinctive feature of the course is its integration of contemporary research through required student presentations of published academic papers, allowing students to engage directly with professional economic research and develop skills in critically evaluating empirical strategies and interpreting results. The course also includes a research proposal component where students design their own labor economics study, moving from consumers to potential producers of economic knowledge. Throughout the semester, theoretical concepts are grounded in real-world applications through problem sets, current events discussions, podcasts, and policy debates. By examining how labor markets function and how policies affect worker outcomes, students gain analytical tools valuable for informed citizenship, policy engagement, and their own career development as they prepare to enter the labor market themselves.

This course goes beyond the first econometrics course  to cover such topics as analysis of time series data, pooling of cross section and time series data, instrumental variables and other quasi-experimental designs, estimation of simultaneous equation models and estimation of limited dependent variable models—techniques that are part of every applied economist’s toolkit.  The course is based on Chapters 10-17 of Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics, A Modern Approach.