In the recent years, IEPR has sponsored activities around high impact themes including the topics found below.
Behavioral Economics
Standard economic theory relies on the rational paradigm and often fails to provide an acurrate description of how people make choices. Experimental tests help measuring departures between observed behavior and models. This enlightens the design of new models capable of explaining and predicting how economic agents make decisions and how this affects economic outcomes.
Mechanism Design and Market Design
Mechanism design builds on game theory to study solution concepts for private information games. As an application, auction theory studies the design of auction mechanisms by modeling how people make decisions in auction markets.
Developmental Decision-making
Economists have traditionally neglected to study decision-making in children and teenagers. Recent research suggests that adult behavior and adult life outcomes are the consequence of what we learn (and do not learn) during childhood and adolescence. Understanding the developmental trajectories of decision-making and strategic thinking is key to inform education and policy around children and teens.
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is concerned with large-scale economic factors and it studies the behavior, structure and behavior of an economy as a whole. It addresses the effects of policy tools (such as interest rates, taxes and subsidies) to regulate an economy’s growth at the regional, national, and global levels.
Development and Policy
Development Economics deals with economic aspects of the development process in countries characterized by low income, low education levels and poor health. The objectives of the field are to understand the mechanisms that drive the development process and their failures, and to design policies to assist developing countries.
Industrial Organization
Industrial Organization focuses on how firms interact in markets. The field builds on the theory of the firm and game theory to study the structure of firms and markets. An important aspect of the field is also to offer policy oriented predictions.
Contact
Professor Juan Carrillo
Director
Department of Economics – KAP 116 G
University of Southern California
3620 S. Vermont Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0253