AGEC 516 Mathematical Tools for Agricultural and Applied Economics

Senior/Graduate-level

This course covers introductory level mathematics for graduate students in Agricultural and Applied Economics. The goal is to provide students with a set of mathematical tools to support graduate coursework in microeconomics, macroeconomics, linear programming, and econometrics. This course pursues practical use of mathematics in economics rather than a rigorous treatment of mathematics itself. We will cover the basics of calculus, matrix algebra, optimization theory, and statistics, emphasizing applications to applied problems.

AGEC 605 Agricultural Markets and Price Analysis

Graduate-level

Agricultural markets are multi-faceted, having been studied using a wide range of analytical tools. This graduate-level course emphasizes charactering demand and supply of agricultural markets and understanding forces that determine commodity and food prices. It also aims to cover a set of economic studies of prices and assist students in applying theoretical frameworks and time-series econometrics to empirical analysis of agricultural prices. In addition to studying prices in perfectly competitive markets, the first half of the course highlights several classic models of consumer demand and agricultural supply, prices under imperfect competition, price spreads (marketing margins), and the economics of information. The second half of the course focuses on empirical price analysis. Popular time-series econometric tools are introduced to study price relationships over space and time, price discovery mechanisms, and functions of futures markets.

AGEC 622 Organization of Agricultural and Food Markets

Ph.D.-level

This course focuses on industrial organization (I.O.) issues in agricultural and food markets. These markets could hardly be considered to be perfectly competitive. Processing and marketing sectors of agricultural products have been evolving dramatically in recent decades, both in developed and developing economies. Specifically, food manufacturing and retailing have consolidated, product differentiation has increased, and vertical coordination of stages along the supply chain has strengthened. Analysis of these topics requires methodologies from the realm of applied I.O. This course provides students with basic analytical tools for related topics by referring to classic and frontier research papers on I.O. issues in agricultural and food markets in the United States and developing economies. Training students to write research papers using applied I.O. methods is another goal.