Economics 350, Spring 2022: PRIVATE Syllabus |
Instructor: James J. Heckman
- Lecture times: Wednesdays 5:30 – 8:20pm
- Lecture classroom: Saieh Hall, Room 141
- Teaching Assistants:
- Ari Anisfeld (anisfeld@uchicago.edu)
- Tanya Rajan (tanyar@uchicago.edu)
- TA Session:
- Mondays, 4:30 – 5:30pm
- Saieh Hall, Room 141
- Make up Sessions: Mondays, 4:30 – 7:30pm
Occasionally, the instructor may use a TA session to supplement or make up a class.
If you experience problems with this website, please contact Jennifer Pachon.
Course Description
This course examines the theory and evidence about inequality and social mobility (within and across generations). We focus on skills, how they are produced, their pricing, and their supply to the market.
Lecture Plan
Format
The three hour evening session will be divided into two one-hour and twenty minute sessions each week. Ideally, the first part of each session will be a lecture on general issues; in the second part, we will discuss empirical studies relevant to these issues.
Inequality and Social Mobility
- Measures (wealth, income, earnings, health, employment and labor supply)
- The evidence and quality of evidence
- Units of measurement (person, household, extended family)?
- Debates on measures of income and income mobility and their consequences
- Roles of:
- Skills and prices (including discrimination); skill prices vs. rates of return
- Family structure and demography
- Transfers, social insurance, welfare dependence, and the growth of the welfare state
- Credit market constraints: Lending and borrowing
- Sorting, peer effects, and neighborhoods
- Which skills?
- Schooling
- On the Job Training
- Tasks and Skills
- Traits and skills
- Definition of tasks and relationship with skills
- Hedonic models, sorting, and endogenous tasks
- Life cycle skills
- Traditional human capital models (OJT; schooling)
- Learning by doing
- Production of traits and skills
- Imitation and emulation
- Markets and Technology
- Monopsony and monopoly
- Technology: AI and innovation, role of robots, skill-biased technical change
- Families
- Marriage markets
- Fertility
- Investment
- Parental influence: parenting, parental styles and production of preferences and traits
- Neighborhood and Peer Effects: Is zip code destiny? Why does geography matter for life outcomes?
Grading
This is a seminar-style course based on weekly student participation by all students guided by faculty lectures and TA review sessions. For each topic, we will select a few leading papers to be discussed by the entire class. Different students will be designated to lead discussions. In addition, each week all students will be asked to assess the papers discussed in a concise, 2-3 page summary. Student engagement in the weekly reports will receive credit. In addition, there will be homework exercises to cement understanding of the material. This may entail some empirical work applying the methods learned. There will be a take-home final synthesizing class material.
Grades are determined as follows:
- Weekly reports: 30%
- Homework: 20%
- Final exam: 50%
Bonus credit will be given for quality participation.
Lecture Notes
Lecture notes for each week will be posted on the Canvas site in advance of each lecture on the website. The handouts distill and complement the readings.
Supplemental Reading List
The Some Suggested Reading list contains paper of interest for this course. Background material on methodology and additional readings on each topic are available on the Supplemental Reading List which gives students information on frontier papers.
Week by Week General Topics
- Inequality and Social Mobility: Basic Measures
- Skills and Schooling
- Preferences/Skills/Preference and Habit Formation
- Skills, Tasks and Occupations
- Discrimination and Disparities
- Role of Firms/Monopsony
- Lifecycle Models and Dynamics
- Family Influence
- Neighborhood and Peer Effects: Chetty and Beyond
- Evaluating the Welfare State