Teaching Materials for "A Short Course on Microeconomics for Public Policy"
In the summer of 2022, I had the opportunity to teach a 6 week summer course (8 hours in-class time per week) on microeconomics for incoming Masters of Public Policy students at Princeton University. The following list provides my materials for the course -- lecture notes and problem sets. Below that, I provide more background for the course and my motivation for writing/assembling these materials.
I am releasing these lecture notes and problem sets under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please take them, remix them, and use them in your courses or work, under the terms of the license. I provide the editable DOCX files for this purpose. Huge advantage of this: if you spot an error or something you don't like, you can fix it!
Applications of the Supply & Demand Model to Government Policies of Price Controls, Taxation, and Subsidies; Elasticities; and Quadratic Maximization. PDF DOCX PSET
Clarifications and Extensions of Perfect Competition, and Applications. PDF DOCX PSET
Midterm Exams: Practice, Answer Key; Actual, Actual with Answers
Externalities and Property Rights. PDF DOCX PSET (this PSET is for Modules 8 and 9)
Risk, Information, and Behavioral Economics. PDF DOCX (for PSET - see Module 8)
Final Exams: Practice, Answer Key; Actual
Background on the course and materials
In the summer of 2022, I had the opportunity to teach a 6 week summer course (8 hours in-class time per week) on microeconomics for incoming Masters of Public Policy students at Princeton University. These students had 7-10 years of real world experience in public policy and related organizations, and a strong interest in making the world better through policy change. They would go on to a full year of instruction from Princeton faculty. My goal: rigorously cover core economics topics with a focus on those relevant to public policy, and with serious policy applications.
I found no textbook suitable for this purpose. The closest was Lee Friedman's (2002) The Microeconomics of Public Policy Analysis. But it is an old text, clearly designed for a full semester course, and I found it imperfect in other ways too. Previously the course would use a traditional intermediate microeconomics textbook, Goolsbee, Levitt, and Syverson (2020) Microeconomics. This textbook is clearly not geared toward public policy; for instance, SNAP/Food Stamps does not even show up in the index!
Thus, I wrote and assembled my own lecture notes for the course. I borrowed heavily from the creative commons textbook of Patrick M. Emerson. Intermediate Microeconomics. https://open.oregonstate.education/intermediatemicroeconomics/chapter/module-1/. I also include excerpts from Ariel Rubinstein. Economic Fables. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2012, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0020. Finally, I used excerpts from Wikipedia articles in some places. However, my version is substantially different from these sources. Much of these notes have been rewritten from the sources, or entirely written by me.