First Year Seminars in Economics
The Economics Department will offer several first-year seminars during
the 2008-09 academic year. Course descriptions appear below.
FYS-2008
1134 A Woman’s Place: Balancing Work
and Family
This course examines the changing economic role of women and the
effects these changes have had on women’s choices regarding careers,
family, and fertility. This course assumes no prior background in
economics, so some class time is devoted to teaching the basic economic
concepts needed to understand and analyze gender differences in
economic outcomes important to work and family. Using the tools of
economic analysis, this course examines issues such as gender wage
differences, occupational choice, discrimination, and family
decision-making. An emphasis is placed on economic policies designed to
address gender inequality, particularly those policies intended to
promote equality in choices related to balancing market work and family
formation.
Dr. Horney
1124 Sports Economics
Using the tools of economic analysis, this course examines issues in
professional and amateur sports, including market structure, antitrust,
labor relations, college athletics, discrimination, Title IX
regulations, and competition reforms.
Dr. Roe
FYW-2008 (These first year
seminars focus in part on writing improvement).
1163 Freakonomics
This course will use the bestselling book FREAKONOMICS by Steven Levitt
and Stephen Dubner as a catalyst to explore economics principles and
persuasive writing, and their application to important social issues
such as crime, abortion, and education policy.
Dr. Brown
1142 Is Wal-Mart a Monster or a Miracle?
In 1945, Sam Walton purchased a Ben Franklin variety store from the
Butler Brothers Franchise. By 1962, he had opened the first Wal-Mart.
Today, Wal-Mart is among the largest corporations in the world with
sales that exceed 250 billion dollars. This course examines the
economic forces and business decisions that contributed to Wal-Mart's
extraordinary growth. It examines the controversies related to
"big-box" retail stores, including their effects on local businesses,
consumers, traffic congestion, and urban development. It examines the
emergence of Wal-Mart's "global supply chain" and its implications for
efficiency and well-being in the United States and developing
countries. It also considers the effects of Wal-Mart's exceptional
buying power and its controversial labor practices. In the end, we
assess whether Wal-Mart is the economic miracle of our time or a
monster that should be contained by government policy and regulation.
Dr. Peterson
1154 The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776) is, arguably, the most important book on economics ever
published. This work essentially created the discipline of economics as
a modern social science, and practically every field of economic study
can trace its roots to the work. Perhaps more importantly, the central
tenets of the book provide the intellectual rationale for the free
enterprise system of markets and government embraced by much of the
modern world. Using selections from the Wealth of Nations as the point
of departure for discussion, this seminar addresses the central
questions of political economy: What makes some nations wealthy and
others poor? Which is the best economic system? How are a country’s
wealth and income distributed among its citizens? What are the concerns
relating to an unequal distribution of income? How should we provide
aid to the poor? In addition to looking for answers to these questions
in the Wealth of Nations, supplemental materials are drawn from a wide
variety of sources to explore the answers that other great (and
not-so-great) economic thinkers of the past 300 years have supplied in
order to see how modern economic thought and criticism has evolved from
the time of Adam Smith. (Note: This will also be offered in FYS form
during spring 2008).
Dr. Yankow