The course studies of the functioning of the labour markets from two complementary perspectives:

The module Topics in Human Capital:

centers on two main areas of research in Economics of Education: investment in education and returns to education. The course focuses on the following topics: the causal relationship between education and income, the pecuniary, non-pecuniary, and social returns to education, and resources and policies to acquire quality education. The course takes an applied economics approach to the research topics by focusing on how to bring the theory to the data and empirically estimate the relationships of interest.

The module Topics in Labour Markets:

analyzes first the functioning (supply, demand and equilibrium) of a perfectly competitive labor market; then, it focuses on wage determination. Third, the course focuses on income and wage inequalities and their components (e.g. permanent income hypothesis). The final part of the course will review some of the evidence in the literature and discuss empirical applications on labor economics.