The availability of elective courses varies from year to year, subject to the approval of the Division Head of both universities.
SE_POL 406: Topics in Health Policy
This empirical course will cover key topics in health economics, with the aim to provide students with an overview of the U.S. health care system, its components, and the challenges created by the political economy of the system. Emphasis will be given to the overlap between health economics and other applied microeconomics fields, such as industrial organization, public economics, and labor economics. We will explore theory and evidence on the links between health care, insurance, and the labor market; socioeconomic determinants of health; disparities in health; and topics like mental health, long-term care, and disability. Empirical methodologies will be based on the reduced form techniques such as difference-in-differences, fixed effects, regression discontinuity, and include analysis of experiments.
By the end of this course, students will have a clear understanding of how the tools of economics are used to evaluate health-related policies. They will be able to identify crucial health policy questions, identify potential data sources and methodologies to evaluate policies, and come up with recommendations for policymakers.
SE_POL 408: Applied Data Science and Applications in Social Policy
This course introduces the process of using data and data science techniques to explore and examine problems or issues related to social policy. Data science is a new powerful approach or discipline that combines various aspects of statistics, programming, mathematics, computer science, and visualization techniques. In this course, we will learn the fundamentals of methods for harnessing and analyzing the vast quantities of new and heterogeneous data using the Python programming language.
SE_POL 410: Economics of Education
This course provides the foundational tools for analyzing the economics of education. It will provide several different explanations for why people go to school, including both the signaling and human capital models. Methods for estimating the returns to schooling (i.e. income boosts that can be attributed to education) will be applied and covered in detail. These methods include regression, difference-in-difference, regression discontinuity, and instrumental variables. These tools will also be used to analyze other important questions within education, such as the impact of smaller classes and the importance of teachers. Finally, depending on time and student interest other topics will be explored, such as student debt, school accountability, and higher education finance.
SE_POL 411: Policies in Practice
The premise of this class is that along with traditional approaches to policy analysis, it also is important to have tools and concepts to understand policies “on the ground”—how they directly affect people and organizational practices. How are policies implemented, understood, adapted, augmented, worked around, or resisted in particular organizational contexts? This course will introduce students to important basic ideas of ethnographic fieldwork, both from a historical perspective on how ethnographic field studies have been used to understand organizations in the past (and the concepts that have been developed in these studies) and from the perspective of newer, contemporary approaches (e.g., the use of video interaction analysis methods). The course will also locate policy as one among several social scientific conceptions of how organizations change. Finally, the class will consider the role of human learning in how policies are experienced and implemented. The culminating assignment for the class will be a small fieldwork study in which students investigate a context in which a policy has been implemented and seek to understand through ethnographic methods (e.g. interviews, observations) how the policy is experienced and understood by relevant organizational stakeholders.
SE_POL 414: Strategic Behavior and Policy Analysis
This course will apply economic models (including both game theory and market theory) toward understanding practical problems faced by both individuals and policymakers. Each week students will participate in an experiment (i.e. class activity) in which they compete/cooperate with classmates. Relevant theories will then be articulated and students will be encouraged to reflect on what they observe. Furthermore, when possible, data will be collected and analyzed to determine how well the theoretical model applies to actual behavior.
SE_POL 415: Leadership in Organizations
This course explores individual, organizational, and social factors that influence how leadership is defined and enacted in organizations. This exploration highlights theories and models of effective leadership, providing opportunities to build knowledge, develop your own perspectives, and practice the leadership skills necessary to face the challenges of leading organizations for positive impact in complex environments. We will explore the concept of leadership as a set of organizational responsibilities that are socially conditioned and shaped by different cultural values, social contexts, and individual identities. Readings and activities will cover leadership issues such as: aligning and articulating connections among organization mission, strategy, and culture; recognizing and countering bias to support evidence-based decisions, inclusion, and equity; modeling emotional intelligence; and, developing and inspiring new, emerging leaders.
*This course is jointly offered with the MS in Leadership and Organizational Change (MSLOC) program. MSLOC charges an additional fee (approx. $465 USD) for staffing, technology, and during courses with an on-site component. MSLOC also might charge additional fees for assessments or simulations.
SE_POL 417: International Negotiations in Policy Administration
Negotiations—the process of reaching an agreement when two or more interdependent parties have conflicting interests and positions—are common in all walks of life. Public policy professionals, however, face a unique challenge. They have to routinely operate in a variety of social settings with diverse entities—state, public, private, business, government, non-government. These challenges get augmented in a globally-connected and interdependent world where national cultural contexts introduce an added layer of complexity around effective communication, sense-making, and interpersonal impression management. Policy planners and administrators can prepare themselves better to attain more desirable ‘win-win’ outcomes with an understanding of diverse cultural contexts and how they impact negotiations. This course is designed to provide the necessary knowledge, practice, and techniques to effectively overcome the cultural barriers in international negotiations and acquire global leadership skills for successful careers.
SE_POL 418: Economics of Immigration
Immigration is a critical policy issue in both the United States and virtually every other part of the world. As a result, immigration has been an active area of study for economists. This course aims to provide an in-depth examination of the theoretical concepts and empirical tools necessary to understand several key aspects of international migration, as well as the welfare implications of immigration for both host and home countries. We will be discussing economic theory and academic papers that have extensive amounts of data analysis. By the end of the course, students will have acquired a comprehensive understanding of the economics of immigration and its impact on the economy. They will learn how to evaluate the welfare implications of different immigration policies, such as open borders, selective immigration, and guest worker programs. They will also have developed the skills and knowledge necessary to evaluate the effects of immigration on the labor market, wages, productivity, and economic growth, enabling them to evaluate research and offer well-informed policy recommendations.
SE_POL 419: Digital Marketplaces and Economic Policy Research
The course explores the intersection of digital marketplaces, advanced data science, and economic policy research. The course covers the design and optimization of marketplaces, including demand and pricing functions, growth and acquisition, retention and churn modeling, and data science and engineering. In the second half, students apply marketplace concepts to economic research, learning about regression discontinuity designs, social and economic policy research, and featured research seminars. Through hands-on projects and presentations, students develop a deep understanding of the complexities of digital marketplaces and their applications in economic policy research.
SE_POL 420: Applied Public Finance
The purpose of this course is to 1) provide a working knowledge of modern empirical analysis and brief theoretical underpinnings of selected topics in public finance and 2) to gain experience in identifying and answering public finance-related research questions. The course emphasizes the tools necessary to harness data to answer policy-relevant questions. Topics covered include the measurement of incidence for taxes and subsidies, empirical applications of theories for the provision of public goods, estimation of elasticities of taxable income and their implications for optimal tax-and-transfer policy, detecting and counteracting tax evasion and avoidance, and applications of fiscal federalism and tax competition.
SE_POL 421: Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models in Social Policy
This course provides an introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of social policy analysis. Students will explore how NLP techniques—such as text classification, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and event extraction—can be applied to social and economic policy-relevant questions. The course covers both foundational NLP methods and advanced applications, including how deep learning and neural networks can process and analyze large-scale text data to inform decision-making. Through hands-on exercises in Python, students will develop practical skills in building text analytics pipelines, training and fine-tuning language models, and interpreting the outputs of AI-driven policy research. Key topics include:
- NLP fundamentals: text extraction, preprocessing, and embeddings
- Sentiment analysis, text classification, and topic modeling
- Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BERT and GPT for social policy applications
- Ethical considerations and biases in AI-driven text analysis
- Visualization and interpretation of NLP outputs
By the end of the course, students will be able to apply NLP techniques to real-world policy issues, design and implement machine learning models for text analysis, and critically evaluate the role of AI in influencing social policy.
SE_POL 422: Applied Macroeconomic Modeling
The purpose of this course is to 1) provide an applied knowledge of the use of monetary and fiscal policy to moderate or exasperate the business cycle 2) to gain experience in computationally solving basic business cycle and similar macroeconomic models. The course emphasizes the modeling tools commonly used by macroeconomists throughout academia and government. Topics covered include business cycles, calibration and estimation of macroeconomic models, and models of heterogeneous agents, all within the context of monetary and fiscal policy
SE_POL 423: The Economics of Crime and the Criminal Justice System
This course uses the theoretical and empirical tools of economics to analyze criminal laws and criminal behaviors. Topics will include economic models of criminal behavior, the societal costs of crime, the deterrent effects of policing and punishment, the relationship between material conditions and criminal behavior, and the practical functioning of criminal legal systems. Throughout the course, students will engage with current applied economic research around crime and punishment, and significant time and attention will be given to empirical methods used to evaluate the laws and policies regulating crime. While the course will be focused on empirical research, we will also take care to understand the legal and policy context in which this research takes place. Discussions of crime data and data analysis will be accompanied by examples of criminal statutes and examinations of how the criminal legal system works in practice. Additionally, we will, wherever possible, use research from outside of the United States in an effort to apply economic analysis in many different contexts.