Undergraduate and MBA:
This course provides an introduction to real estate with a focus on investment and financing issues. Project evaluation, financing strategies, investment decision making and real estate capital markets are covered. No prior knowledge of the industry is required, but students are expected to rapidly acquire a working knowledge of real estate markets. Classes are conducted in a standard lecture format with discussion required. The course contains cases that help students evaluate the impact of more complex financing and capital markets tools used in real estate.
PhD:
In this course we will explore topics in urban economics applied to developing country settings. We will discuss the specificities of developing country urbanization, emphasizing institutional constraints, market imperfections, and key policy questions. We will also discuss methodological challenges arising when conducting research on developing country cities, such as data limitations, and the creative ways in which recent papers have addressed them. The goal is to give students an overview of the important questions in the field and of the cutting-edge tools employed in this growing literature. Some of the topics we will explore include: migration, slums, infrastructure and transit, land use, urban form, place-based policies, local public finance, and quantitative urban models.
Undergraduate:
This course will introduce you to "managerial economics" which is the application of microeconomic theory to managerial decision-making. Microeconomic theory is a remarkably useful body of ideas for understanding and analyzing the behavior of individuals and firms in a variety of economic settings. The goal of the course is for you to understand this body of theory well enough so that you can effectively analyze managerial (and other) problems in an economic framework. While this is a "tools" course, we will cover many real-world applications, particularly business applications, so that you can witness the usefulness of these tools and acquire the skills to use them yourself. We will depart from the usual microeconomic theory course by giving more emphasis to prescription: What should a manager do in order to achieve some objective? That course deliverable is to compare with description: Why do firms and consumers act the way they do? The latter will still be quite prominent in this course because only by understanding how other firms and customers behave can a manager determine what is beswt for him or her to do. Strategic interaction is explored both in product markets and auctions. Finally, the challenges created by asymmetric information - both in the market and within the firm - are investigated.