Applied Microeconomics I - JCM044

• Title: Aplikovaná mikroekonomie I
• Guaranteed by: CERGE (23-CERGE)
• Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences
• Actual: from 2023
• Semester: winter
• E-Credits: 9
• Examination process: winter s.:
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:4/2, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: 25 / unknown (unknown)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: taught
• Language: Czech
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment; priority enrollment if the course is part of the study plan
• Guarantor: Andreas Menzel, Ph.D.
• Teacher(s): doc. PhDr. Jan Zápal, Ph.D.

Descriptors

This course introduces you to economic fundamentals like preferences, costs, demand and supply, perfect and imperfect competition, welfare, monopoly, oligopoly, and market failure. These fundamentals are critical to understanding how markets work, to design successful business strategies and policies that increase social welfare. We will also familiarise ourselves with strategies to test the theories covered in the course with data, and apply these techniques to example data.

At the end of the course you will understand:

1. How economists model consumer's decisions which goods, and how much of each good, to consume.

2. How economists model markets, the central institution bringing together consumer's demands and producer's supply of goods, and how markets shape these demands and supplies.

3. How economists model government interventions with the goal of affecting prices and the quantities of goods in markets. Furthermore, we develop standard tools that economists use to evaluate "how good" different policy interventions are, in order to be able to decide which policy is best in a set of potentially different policy options. We will have a special focus on labor markets. 

4. Under which conditions market work efficiently in maximizing overall welfare, and under what conditions this cannot generally be assumed, and which remedial actions policymakers can take to improve welfare in such situations. 

5. How economists use microdata (that is, data collected on the level of individual persons, households, products, or firms) to test if microeconomic theories match data, and if policy interventions have their desired effects.

Last update: Papariga Anna, Mgr. (15.09.2022)

Literature

1) Textbooks

• The main textbook, which I will closely follow, is Perloff, Jeffery, Microeconomics, Pearson, 2011, 6th edition. (there are many copies in the library).

2) Additional materials

• Every week I will provide you with the Study Guide for each chapter in the Perloff textbook. The Study Guide gives you a chapter summary, a quick guide to key concepts and formulas, as well as additional applications, and it walks you through the solution of many problems.
• Prior to each seminar, a handout with exercises will be posted on the website and these will be covered during the exercise session.

3) Further readings - letting data speak...

• I will illustrate the concepts with the results of empirical papers. The papers are posted in the folder below. I encourage you to read respective papers if you are interested to learn more about a particular topic.

Last update: Papariga Anna, Mgr. (15.09.2022)

Requirements to the exam

Grading will be based on a midterm (30%), a graded take-home assignment based on data analysis (30%), and a final exam (40%). 

 

Last update: Papariga Anna, Mgr. (15.09.2022)

Syllabus

1. Preferences, consumer choice and demand.
2. Firms, costs and supply
3. Labor markets and labor market policies
4. The functioning of competitive markets
5. Welfare in markets.
6. Monopoly, oligopoly, and monopolistic competition.
7. Demand elasticity, mark-ups and profits.
8. Market failures and government intervention 

Last update: Papariga Anna, Mgr. (15.09.2022)