Econ 150: Labor Economics Summer 2023
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Econ 150: Labor Economics
Summer 2023
1 Zoom
You can find the Zoom link for each class in Canvas under the Zoom link.
2 General information
2.1 Course Materials
This course is designed to provide you with an understanding of labor markets. Obvi- ously, a labor market is a market where a unit of labor is bought and sold. Like any other market in economics, labor is a good and has a “price,” called a wage. There are many different labor “markets.” Markets can be segmented by education levels, experience, industry, etc. You will learn some of the basic data, theory and policies associated with labor markets.
. Book (required)
– Labor Economics by George Borjas.
– We will be using McGraw Hill Connect for homework and exams.
– Class policy: There will be 3 equally weighted exams. No make-up exams are given. If you miss one of the exams the other 2 exams will be re- weighted to 50% each. If you are a student with a disability and would like to discuss special academic accommodations, please contact me during office hours. Campus regulations on academic integrity apply; cheating will trigger a report to the Office of Judicial Affairs and usually a course grade F. All course materials and the intellectual content of the course itself are protected by United States Federal Copyright Law and the California Civil Code. UC Policy expressly prohibits students (and all other persons) from recording lectures or discussions and from distributing or selling lectures notes and all other course materials without the prior written permission of the instructor.
3 grading
. exams: 70%
. homework: 15%; Smartbook 5%
. R homework and graphs: 10%
4 Using R
. Data
– You will learn how to find and examine data that come from the source, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). To analyze data you will become familiar with R. R isa (free) opensource programming and graphing language that is not too difficult to learn but does has some upfront setup. I will get you going with R but you should get it downloaded before class starts. We will work through downloading, manipulating and presenting data. Why? It is a highly valued skill in many professions and will look very good on your resume! I will provide templates so it will be fairly straightforward.Here is the link for R and Rstudio. Rstudio is a very good all-in-one solution that I recommend for first time users. I realize that programming skills differ immensely and I am not trying to turn anyone into a programmer. However, this simple tool will be valuable for many different careers.
– Get the above downloaded before the first day of class and start playing around with it, there are lots and lots of resources on the web to help you get going. The UCSB library also has R and RStudio to use.
– some notes from datahack
– datacamp
– It is also possible to run a regressions in R and many different ways to manipulate data.
1 8/7 Intro, R and stuff Ch. 1
2 8/8 data
3 8/9 Labor Supply Ch. 2
4 8/14 Labor Supply, cont. Ch. 2
5 8/15 Labor Demand Ch. 3
6 8/16 Labor Demand, cont. Ch. 3
8/21 Exam 1 Ch. 1-3 and slides
7 8/22 Market interaction Ch. 4
8 8/23 Compensating Wage Differentials Ch. 5
9 8/28 Human Capital Ch. 6
10 8/29 Inequality Ch. 7
11 8/30 Markets with frictions and unemployment notes and Ch. 12
9/4 Labor Day
9/5 Exam 2 Ch. 4, 5, 6, 7 and slides 12 9/6 Markets with frictions and unemployment, cont. notes and Ch. 12
14 9/12 Unions Ch. 10
15 9/13 Exam 3 Ch. 9, 10, 12 and slides
2023-08-08