For readings marked with a †, you are responsible for familiarizing yourself with the reading before lecture.
[MM]=Angrist, Joshua D., and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect. Princeton University Press, 2014.
[IM]=Banerjee, Samiran. Intermediate Microeconomics: A Tool-Building Approach, 2nd edition. Routledge, 2021.
1. The Consequences of Minimum Wage Laws for Earnings and Employment
Required Reading
- [MM] Chapter 5, “Differences-in-Differences.”
Recommended Reading
- [IM] Chapter 10.1 and 10.2, “Monopoly”; Mathematical appendix.
2. Testing Theory: The Fundamental Problem of Causal Evidence
Required Reading
- † Card, David, and Krueger, Alan B. “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food
Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” American Economic Review 84, no. 4 (September 1994): 772–793. - [MM] Chapter 1, “Randomized Trials.”
Recommended Reading
- Math Tools for 14.03/003 (PDF).
- Holland, Paul W. “Statistics and Causal Inference.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 81, no. 396 (1986): 945–960.
- Cengiz, Doruk, Arindrajit Dub, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer. “The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low Wage Jobs” (PDF). The Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, no. 3 (2019): 1405–1454.
- Dugger, Celia W. “Wage Laws Squeeze South Africa’s Poor.” New York Times, September 26, 2010.
- Krueger, Alan B. “The Minimum Wage: How Much is Too Much?” New York Times, October 9, 2015.
- Neumark, David. “Who Really Gets the Minimum Wage.” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2014.
3. Introducing Consumer Theory: The Foundation of Microeconomics
Recommended Reading
- [IM] Chapter 3, “Preferences.”
- Krugman, Paul. Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Ohlin Lectures). Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1995. Chapters 1 and 3, pp. 1–7, 67–88.
4–5. Consumer Sovereignty: The Carte Blanche Principle and Health Insurance Demand
Required Reading
- † Bleemer, Zachary, and Aashish Mehta. “Will Studying Economics Make You Rich? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of the Returns to College Major.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14, no. 2 (2022): 1–22.
- [MM] “Regression Discontinuity Designs.”
Recommended Readings
- Finkelstein, Amy, Nathaniel Hendren, and Mark Shepard. “Subsidizing Health Insurance for Low-Income Adults: Evidence from Massachusetts.” American Economic Review 109, no. 4 (2019): 1530–1567.
- Liscow, Zachary, and Abigail Pershing. “Why Is So Much Redistribution In-Kind and Not in Cash? Evidence from a Survey Experiment.” National Tax Journal 75, no. 2 (2022): 313–354.
6. From Preferences to Demand Curves
Recommended Reading
[IM] Chapter 4, “Individual Demands.”
7. Income Effects, Substitution Effects, and the Design of Anti-Poverty Programs
Required Reading
- † Eissa, Nada, and Jeffery B. Liebman. “Labor Supply Response to the Earned Income Tax
Credit.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111, no. 2 (1996): 605–637.
Recommended Reading
- [IM] Chapter 5.1, “Consumer Comparative Statics: Price and Income Consumption Curves.”
8. Income, Substitution, and Subsistence
Required Reading
- †Jensen, Robert, and Nolan Miller, “Giffen Behavior and Subsistence Consumption.” American
Economic Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 1553–1577.
Recommended Reading
- [IM] Chapter 5.3, “Consumer Comparative Statics: Decomposing Price Effects.”
9. Consumer Theory Wrap-Up
No readings
10. Applied Competitive Analysis: The Incidence of a Tax
Required Reading
- † Chetty, Raj, Adam Looney, and Kory Kroft. “Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence.”
American Economic Review 99, no. 4 (2009): 1145–1177.
11. Applied Competitive Analysis: Free Entry in a Cartelized Market
Required Reading
- † Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. “Can Free Entry Be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions
and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry.” Journal of Political Economy 111, no. 5 (2003):
1076–1122.
Recommended Reading
- Mian, Atif, and Amir Sufi. “The Effects of Fiscal Stimulus: Evidence from the 2009 Cash for
Clunkers Program.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 127, no. 3 (2012): 1107–1142.
12. Putting Markets Together: The Edgeworth Box
Required Reading
[IM] Chapter 6, “Exchange Economies.”
13. The Gains from Market Integration: “The Digital Provide”
Required Reading
- †Jensen, Robert. “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and
Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (2007):
879–924.
14. International Trade and Comparative Advantage
Recommended Reading
- Krugman, Paul. The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science.” Penguin, 1999.
- Kristof, Nicholas D. “Let Them Sweat.” New York Times, June 25, 2002, Section A.
15. Does Trade Raise National Income?
Required reading
- †Feyrer, James. “Trade and Income—Exploiting Time Series in Geography.” American Economic
Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 4 (2019): 1–35.
Recommended Reading
- [MM] Chapter 3, “Instrumental Variables.”
16. The Free Trade Dilemma
Required reading
- † Topalova, Petia. “Factor Immobility and Regional Impacts of Trade Liberalization: Evidence on
Poverty from India.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2, no. 4 (2010): 1–41.
Recommended Reading
- Autor, David. “Trade and Worker Welfare: Understanding the Costs and Benefits.” Center for
Equitable Growth Policy Brief, October 2016. - Autor, David, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market
Effects of Import Competition in the United States.” American Economic Review 103, no. 6
(2013): 2121–2168
17. Externalities: Definition, Consequences, and Remedies
Required Reading
- † Anderson, Michael L. “Subways, Strikes, and Slowdowns: The Impacts of Public Transit on Traffic
Congestion.” American Economic Review 104, no. 9 (2014): 2763–2796.
Recommended Reading
- Schmalensee, Richard, and Robert N. Stavins. “The SO2 Allowance Trading System: The Ironic
History of a Grand Policy Experiment.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 1 (2013):
103–122. - Bergstrom, Theodore. “Lecture 5: Externalities.” UC Santa Barbara, March 2002.
- [IM] Chapter 14, “Externalities.”
18. Risk and Safety Regulation: Hockey Helmets, etc.
Required Reading
- † Schelling, Thomas C. Micromotives and Macrobehaviors. Chapter 7, “Hockey Helmets, Daylight
Savings Time, and Other Binary Choices.” New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.
Recommended Reading
- Banzhaf, H. Spencer. “Retrospectives: The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 4 (2014): 213–226.
- [IM] Chapter 11.4, “Pareto Efficient Risk Sharing.”
19. Adverse Selection
Required Reading
- Akerlof, George A. “The Market for ”Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500.
- [IM] Chapter 12, “Game Theory,” and Chapter 15, “Asymmetric Information.”
20. Adverse Selection, Moral Hazard, and Subprime Lending
Required Reading
- † Keys, Benjamin J., Tanmoy Mukkerjee, Amit Seru, and Vikrant Vig. “Did Securitization Lead
to Lax Screening? Evidence from Subprime Loans.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1
(2010): 307–362.
Recommended Reading
- Einav, Liran, and Amy Finkelstein, " Selection in Insurance Markets: Theory and Empirics in
Pictures.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 1 (2011): 115–138.
21. Discrimination in Labor Markets: Banning the Box
Required Reading
- † Agan, Amanda, and Sonja Starr. “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A
Field Experiment.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 1 (2018): 191–235.
Recommended Reading
- Shannon, Sarah K. S., Christopher Uggen, Jason Schnittker, Melissa Thompson, Sara Wakefield,
and Michael Massoglia. “The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony
Records in the United States, 1948–2010.” Demography 54 (2017): 1795–1818.
22. Guest Lecture: Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi of MIT CSAIL and EECS, “The Pulse Of Ethical Machine Learning in Health”
Please familiarize yourself with these papers before the guest lecture:
- † Chen, Irene Y., Emma Pierson, Sherri Rose, Shalmali Joshi, Kadija Ferryman, and Marzyeh
Ghassemi. “Ethical Machine Learning in Healthcare.” Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science
4, no. 1 (2021): 123–144. - † Seyyed-Kalantari, Laleh, Haoran Zhang, Matthew B. A. McDermott, Irene Y. Chen, and Marzyeh
Ghassemi. “Underdiagnosis Bias of Artificial Intelligence Algorithms Applied to Chest Radiographs
in Under-Served Patient Populations.” Nature Medicine 27, no. 12 (2021): 2176–2182. - † Yang, Yuzhe, Haoran Zhang, Judy W. Gichoya, Dina Katabi, and Marzyeh Ghassemi. “The
Limits of Fair Medical Imaging AI in Real-World Generalization.” Nature Medicine (2024): 1–11.
23. Prediction, Machine Learning, and Decision-Making
Required Reading
- † Einav, Liran, Amy Finkelstein, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ziad Obermeyer. “Predictive Modeling
of U.S. Health Care Spending in Late Life.” Science 360, no. 6396 (2018): 1462–1465. - Obermeyer, Ziad, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Dissecting Racial
Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations.” Science 366, no. 6464 (2019):
447–453.
24. Artificial Intelligence, Discrimination, and Competition in Housing Markets
Required Reading
- † Raymond, Lindsay. “The Market Effects of Algorithms.” MIT Sloan Working Paper, July 2024.
