Billy Foster, PhD
Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
Business Statistics II
Course number:
NEIU – ECONOMICS 310
“All models are wrong, but some are useful”
– Statistician George E P Box in “Science and statistics,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 71:791-799
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as
they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
– Einstein, Albert (1923) in Sidelights on Relativity (Geometry and Experience). P. Dutton., Co., p. 28.
INTRODUCTION
This course is an exploration of writing about statistics. It will combine lecture
about new material, readings by many authors, discussions about writing, outside
writing assignments, and in-class writing exercises. Attendance and participation
will be very important each week.
REQUIRED TEXTS
Innumeracy
John Allen Paulos
ISBN-13: 978-0809058402
Numbers Rule Your World
Kaiser Fung
ISBN-13: 978-0071626538
The Signal and the Noise
Nate Silver
ISBN-13: 978-1594204111
Fooled by Randomness
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
ISBN-13: 978-0812975215
Super Crunchers
Ian Ayres
ISBN-13: 978-0553384734
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte
ISBN-13: 978-0961392147
RECOMMENDED:
Statistics for Business and Economics
Anderson, Sweeney, and Williams
ISBN-13: 978-0538481649
(Any Stats II student should have this already or something similar from Stats I)
Industrial Organization
Course number:
NEIU – ECON 332
“It is not enough to prove that a given industry is not competitive. The crucial question is: how far do the conditions in the industry depart from competition? In many and perhaps most cases the answer is that the departures are not large.”
– George Stigler, The Theory of Price, 1946
INTRODUCTION
Industrial Organization studies market structures, how concentrated industries are, to what extent firms can exercise monopoly power, mergers and takeovers. We will also study the impact of industry structures on consumers: price discrimination, product differentiation, advertising, research and development. Understanding industrial organization brings economic reasoning to cases for which the analyses of extremes of perfect competition or monopoly are not sufficient.
REQUIRED TEXTS
Modern Industrial Organization
Carlton and Perloff
ISBN: 0312180232
The Winner’s Curse
Richard Thaler
ISBN: 0691019347
Labor Economics
Course number:
NEIU – ECON 306D
“Everything in the world is purchased by labour”
– David Hume (1711 – 1776), Essays, Of Commerce
“The property which every man has in his own labour; as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable…”
– Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
INTRODUCTION
This course is a more intricate study of labor markets than is offered in the standard microeconomics courses. We will be applying economic theory to labor markets and related economic phenomena including but not limited to: earnings, employment, unemployment, worker mobility, and discrimination.
REQUIRED TEXT
Labor Economics, Fifth Edition
George J. Borjas
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
ISBN: 0073511366