Economic Sciences Course

Lesson 1 • Scarcity, Choice, and Trade-offs

Introduces the fundamental problem of unlimited wants versus limited resources. Establishes why every choice involves a cost, anchoring all later economic analysis.

Lesson 2 • Economic Systems and Institutions

Surveys market, command, and mixed economies and their institutional frameworks. Provides context for understanding how resource allocation differs across systems.

Lesson 3 • Core Economic Principles

Covers the ten foundational principles guiding economic behavior and policy. Connects rational decision-making to incentive structures used throughout the course.

Lesson 1 • Price Controls and Market Interventions

Examines price ceilings and floors as government tools that disrupt equilibrium. Demonstrates welfare losses and unintended consequences of binding price controls.

Lesson 2 • Elasticity and Market Sensitivity

Quantifies how responsive quantity demanded or supplied is to price and income changes. Connects elasticity values to revenue implications and policy effectiveness.

Lesson 3 • Supply: Concepts and Determinants

Defines supply and the law of supply, identifying producer-side factors that shift the curve. Complements demand analysis to complete the market framework.

Lesson 4 • Market Equilibrium and Price Adjustment

Analyzes how markets clear through price signals and quantity adjustments. Students apply comparative statics to predict outcomes from simultaneous supply-demand shifts.

Lesson 1 • Budget Constraints and Feasible Sets

Models the consumer's income and price constraints as a budget line. Shows how changes in income or prices rotate and shift the feasible consumption set.

Lesson 2 • Utility Maximization and Optimal Choice

Derives the consumer optimum where the highest indifference curve is tangent to the budget line. Links the optimality condition to the equimarginal principle.

Lesson 3 • Utility and Consumer Preferences

Introduces cardinal and ordinal utility, indifference curves, and marginal utility. Provides the preference foundation for the consumer optimization problem.

Lesson 1 • Short-Run Cost Structure

Derives fixed, variable, and total cost curves from the production function. Explains the U-shaped average cost curve via diminishing marginal returns.

Lesson 2 • Long-Run Costs and Economies of Scale

Constructs the long-run average cost curve as the envelope of short-run curves. Identifies economies, diseconomies, and constant returns to scale in practice.

Lesson 3 • Production Functions and Returns to Scale

Defines production functions, isoquants, and returns to scale in the short and long run. Establishes the technical foundation for all cost analysis that follows.

Lesson 1 • Oligopoly and Strategic Interaction

Introduces game theory to model interdependent decision-making among few firms. Covers Cournot, Bertrand, and Stackelberg models of oligopoly competition.

Lesson 2 • Perfect Competition and Efficiency

Models the price-taking firm and derives the short-run and long-run supply curve. Demonstrates how competitive markets achieve allocative and productive efficiency.

Lesson 3 • Antitrust Policy and Market Regulation

Reviews the economic rationale for antitrust enforcement and merger review. Applies concentration measures and efficiency defenses to real market scenarios.

Lesson 4 • Monopoly: Power, Pricing, and Welfare

Analyzes how a single-price monopolist sets output and price above marginal cost. Quantifies deadweight loss and evaluates natural monopoly regulation.

Lesson 1 • Policy Instruments and Cost-Benefit Analysis

Compares taxes, subsidies, standards, and tradable permits as corrective tools. Applies cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the net social value of interventions.

Lesson 2 • Public Goods and Common Resources

Classifies goods by excludability and rivalry, identifying free-rider and tragedy-of-the-commons problems. Evaluates public provision and property rights solutions.

Lesson 3 • Externalities and Social Efficiency

Defines positive and negative externalities and the divergence between private and social costs. Establishes the welfare case for corrective taxes and subsidies.

Lesson 1 • Unemployment: Measurement and Types

Defines the labor force, unemployment rate, and participation rate from household surveys. Classifies frictional, structural, and cyclical unemployment and their policy implications.

Lesson 2 • National Income Accounting

Explains the expenditure, income, and value-added approaches to measuring GDP. Distinguishes nominal from real GDP and introduces price index construction.

Lesson 3 • Business Cycles and Economic Fluctuations

Identifies expansion, peak, contraction, and trough phases of the business cycle. Links cyclical fluctuations to leading, lagging, and coincident economic indicators.

Lesson 1 • Monetary Policy: Instruments and Transmission

Analyzes open market operations, reserve requirements, and policy rate tools. Traces the transmission mechanism from interest rates to output and inflation.

Lesson 2 • Fiscal Policy: Tools and Multipliers

Examines government spending and taxation as demand-management instruments. Derives the spending and tax multipliers and analyzes automatic stabilizers.

Lesson 3 • Aggregate Demand and Supply Framework

Builds the AD-AS model to explain short-run and long-run macroeconomic equilibrium. Provides the analytical backbone for evaluating all stabilization policies.

Lesson 4 • Policy Trade-offs and Coordination

Examines the Phillips curve trade-off between inflation and unemployment over time. Evaluates fiscal-monetary coordination, policy lags, and credibility issues.