Topics in Political Economy

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Political Economy is a relatively new field in economics that combines tools and methods of economics to study political mechanisms for allocating resources. The course is designed to introduce students to tools of formal modeling in political economy and to expose the students to important issues at the frontier of the field. Particular attention is paid to the strategic incentives of political actors, particularly under imperfect information and/or when facing inter-temporal trade offs. Micro III is highly recommended but not required. Among the topics covered include (1) social choice and mechanism design, (2) models of voting incentives, lobbying, campaign contributions, voluntarism, and other forms of political participation, (3) political competition between/among candidates, parties, and interest groups, (4) the role of expertise, pivotal events, ideology, and the media, in electoral aggregation of dispersed information, (5) the dynamic evolution of policies, including provision of public goods, debt, and redistribution, within political institutions, (6) the dynamic evolution of the institutions themselves, (7) comparative performance of political institutions.