Michael A. Kuhn

Econ 311 - Intermediate Microeconomics
    This course is designed to develop an understanding of the three pillars of modern microeconomic theory: consumer behavior, producer behavior and market competition.  Upon completing the course students should feel comfortable solving the mathematical problems that allow them to build basic models of markets, and using their intuitive understanding of the problems to explain the relationship between market inputs like preferences, technologies and costs to market outputs like price and quantity.  The most important mathematical objective is to develop the ability to perform constrained optimization in the context of these classic economic problems.

Econ 451 - Issues in Labor Economics
    This is an issue-based course focused on exposing students to recent economic research on topics of current interest to policy makers.  The goal is to get students comfortable with (1) applying the basic tools of economic models to real-world issues, (2) digesting and critiquing academic research, and (3) discussing the implications of such research for public policy.  Topics covered include race- and gender-based wage disparities, social safety net and poverty policy issues like the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit, incentive contracts and behavioral biases in the workplace and the methodology of modern labor economics.

Graduate (PhD)

Econ 607 - Applied Behavioral Economics
    The goals of the course are to (1) expose students to current research that uses applied microeconomic techniques to test, understand and evaluate the importance of behavioral economics theories, (2) foster the addition of behavioral economics theories to the pool of potential drivers of observed data patterns when evaluating research, and (3) encourage students to develop research ideas of their own.  The course is split into four topic areas: time preferences, risk preferences, social preferences and information processing, with applications across a large variety of fields.  Within each topic, the course covers the underlying theoretical concepts briefly, before moving to the applied literature.