Course content

This course is equivalent with ECON4715 - Labour Economics

The course will present important theories and methods for analyzing labor markets and for understanding labor market research. The course emphasizes relationships between macro phenomena such as unemployment and agents’ behavior in the labor market, focusing on informational problems arising in labor market interactions as well as on the role of unions and employers associations.

The course will also present the empirical tools used to disentangle causality from correlation in numerous labor market studies. These tools are then used, together with the major theories presented, to examine different topics of interest for policymakers. The following topics will be discussed: labor supply, labor demand, unions, collective bargaining, wage inequality, human capital, compensating differentials, Roy selection, incentive pay, discrimination, migration, unemployment and intergenerational mobility.

Learning outcome

Knowledge:

You should know

  • basic mechanisms of the labour market, in particular how unemployment and wage and productivity differences can arise as equilibrium phenomena
  • the building blocks for studying the relationship between the micro and the macro sides of the economy
  • key elements of empirical work that aim at evaluating and quantify the mechanisms of the models

Skills:

You should be able to

  • use analytical models of behaviour and interactions in the labour market as tools to analyse the mechanisms that