Strategic
Corporate Management 45-870
Being “strategic” means intelligently seeking your own goals in situations that involve other parties who do not share your goals. The purpose of this course is to develop your understanding of strategic situations encountered as a manager in a business firm. Taking this course will teach you to recognize strategic opportunities when they arise, to frame those opportunities within a model that your business partners can understand, to predict how your own actions will affect the actions of other parties involved.
Trade and Investment Strategy 45-871
"Trade and Investment Strategy" is a strategy elective on the microstructure of trade and growth in private enterprise. It combines analytic with experimental methods to investigate strategic interactions in bidding, buying, selling, designing trading mechanisms, consumption based portfolio analysis, investment dynamics, and governance.
Personnel Strategy 45-971
This course analyzes how a company develops its human resource base with a view to maximizing its expected value. In the absence of appropriate incentives, the workforce of a firm, its upstream service providers, and even management, do not share the objectives of shareholders. The perspective we take is without apology, strategic. Employees intelligently and capably pursue their own private interests, and the goal of managers is to create a working environment that, roughly speaking, induces employees to achieve the firm’s long term revenue objectives at minimum cost. We show how employment and human resource practice adapt to the economic opportunities and challenges that firms confront.
Econometrics II 47-812
This course analyzes the structural estimation and testing of nonlinear models. It has five segments. First, within two contexts, dynamic discrete choice optimization and continuous choices in a competitive equilibrium, we show how economics models induce a data generating process that provides the basis for estimating the structure of the economic environment, often critical for conducting counterfactual simulations. Then we profile many estimators that have been used to calibrate economic models, with say with an appeal to the law of large numbers. We place the estimators into four categories: estimators for linear data generating processes, parametric nonlinear processes, plus nonparametric and semiparametric estimation. The rationale for the third segment of the course is that the exact distribution of most nonlinear estimators is intractable, and this explains why we resort to large sample theory. We analyze several notions of convergence, derive the asymptotic distribution of several nonlinear estimators, and show how to conduct hypothesis tests. The final segment integrates a discussion of the identification of primitives or deep parameters in economic models with estimation. In this segment we relax the assumption of a fictitious Walrasian auctioneer solving for competitive equilibrium prices, by analyzing market microstructure, including various kinds of auctions, procurement contracts and limit order markets.
Advanced Economic Analysis 47-901
This course explores relationships between economic theory, identification, estimation and econometric practice. It develops structural approaches for analyzing large cross sectional and longitudinal data sets, by exploiting restrictions derived from the equilibrium dynamic outcomes in individual discrete choice optimization problems and non-cooperative games. We investigate empirical content, characterize identification, evaluate alternative estimators and testing procedures, as well as consider counterfactuals. There are three segments. The first analyzes approaches to dynamic discrete choice models, the second applies them to lifecycle models in labor economics and product innovation, while the third is an investigation into the econometrics of optimal contracting.