Seminar in Labor Economics - Einzelansicht

The course does not start until the second week of lectures (from October, 22).

Please note two things: 

1. The seminar is taught in English. This includes the student presentations. You may hand in your term paper (”Hausarbeit”) in German, though.
2. Term papers are to be submitted at the end of the semester.

This course requires a thorough understanding of the basics of microeconomics (e.g., supply and demand curves, market equilibrium), as well as a thorough understanding of basic econometrics/statistics (e.g., linear regression). Further, basic mathematical skills (in particular familiarity with the concept of a derivative) are required.

You will be graded based on a term paper (45%), a presentation of in-progress term paper (15%), in-class participation (20%) and a presentation of assigned empirical paper (20%).

This seminar surveys the field of Labor Economics with an emphasis on theory and empirical facts. Labor economics is the branch of economics that tries to understand how labor markets work: why do some persons choose to work, while others withdraw from the labor market? Why do some firms expand their employment at the same time that other firms are laying off workers? Why are earnings distributed so unequally? Finding answers to such rudimentary, but fundamentally imported, questions is the goal of this course.

Before each session, students will read (parts of) a chapter from the book “Labor Economics” by George Borjas. In class, we will discuss the key theoretical concepts from the book to make sure they are thoroughly understood. Then, we will apply those concepts to the real world. For this, we will read and discuss empirical research papers that have studied the workings of labor markets using quantitative data.

Modern labor markets are complex and, correspondingly, labor economics is a vast field. Accordingly, we can only cover a number of selected topics in this course. Those are:

• Labor supply
• Labor demand 
• Education and human capital
• Migration
• Discrimination