Hi folks,
Welcome to the course on labor economics! I am very happy to teach this course to you—graduate students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds—and I will take that advantage to make this course better.
As you all know, this is a course on labor economics. I am 99% confident that you must know the domestic labor markets of your country better than me. So, this course will end with a Final Presentation, which will be a (perhaps collective) effort to study an important aspect of the labor markets of your country.
Specifically, you will research some particular topic on the labor markets of your country and will give an in-class presentation to show your work. Half of your final grades will depend on your performance on the Term Project.
Another half of final grades will depend on (Take-Home) Homeworks.
Labor economics is a fascinating and constantly evolving field. Today it has gone far beyond the mere study of labor markets. Some hot topics of modern labor economics include inequality, human capital, return on education, immigration, etc. Economists (we) are also digging into the root of labor-market related problems from various perspectives: macro, micro, international, development, urban…
In this course, I will focus on the empirical side of labor economics as modern labor research is heavily empirical. The major benefit of my peculiar teaching strategy is that you will get an impression of what frontier research is about. Having said that, I will (try to) make the lectures accessible even to an undergraduate who has only taken introductory microeconomics. So do not panic! You can learn a lot from this course even if you have no exposure to econometrics or R before.
I look forward to seeing your faces in class.
Haoran LEI
PS: Please call me Albert, or Lei Lao Shi (if you happen to speak some Chinese). Do NOT call me Professor Lei, or Sir, or (even worse) distinguished Professsor!