Teaching

Yale SOM Courses:

  • State & Society (Syllabus: 2021)
    • Firms need governments to protect property rights, enforce contracts, mitigate market failures, and maintain an environment that is conducive to doing business. Governments depend on the private sector for investment, employment, and revenue, and sometimes to mitigate political failures. Future managers and leaders of both for-profit and non-profit private sector entities must understand the ways in which their organization’s mission is dependent on government and devise appropriate strategies vis-à-vis the public sector. Conversely, future public sector leaders must be cognizant of the effects of government action on business. This course is designed to expose students to frameworks derived primarily from the fields of economics and political science that help us analyze the social and political environments within which business operates. The first half of the course focuses on analyzing how government institutions affect the conduct of business and how business can shape government and policy. The second half does deeper dives into a number of pressing policy issues (such as gender and racial discrimination, immigration policy, education policy, public health in light of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the role of evidence in policymaking) that have large effects on employees, managers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Beyond political science and economics, a rigorous analysis of these topics will require us to also draw on scholarship from the fields of law, history and sociology.
  • Behavioral Strategies for Selling New Products in Emerging Markets (Syllabus: 2014)
    • This course discusses strategies to address the challenges of marketing new products in finance, health, education,  agriculture and public services to poor consumers in emerging markets.  We discuss economic models of various impediments to behavior change including risk aversion, hyperbolic discounts, intra-household bargaining, procrastination, habit formation, high price elasticity and learning costs.  The course will provide a methodological grounding for program evaluation and statistical inference based on field experiments.  Students will work on a semester-long group project to launch a venture and will have the option to have their proposal reviewed by D-prize to be considered for $10,000-20,000 in seed capital.
  • Economic Strategies for Doing Business in Developing Countries  (Syllabi:2014, 2010, 2008)
    • This course examines the challenges faced by for profit firms and non-profits operating in the developing world.  The course first focuses on conducting business in environments with weak or deficient institutions, including corruption, contract (non)-enforcement, political risk, and poor investor protection, and discusses firm strategic responses to these challenges.  The second part of the course explores the role of the private sector in development, including both the contributions to and the costs imposed by multi-nationals, non-profits, and NGOs in developing countries.
  • Yale SOM International Experience
    • As part of the Yale integrated MBA curriculum, each first-year student travels to one of several destinations around the world to study the local business environment.  The destinations are the focus of pre-trip sessions in the fall semester and lectures and cases in the State and Society course in the spring. The trip is also linked to the Leadership Development Program, a year-long process of identifying and developing personal and professional goals and aspirations.

Previous Courses:
     Yale Economics Department:

  • Economics of Developing Countries
  • Senior Seminar in Development Economics

     University of Colorado, at Boulder:

  • Ph.D. Seminar in Development Economics
  • Development Economics
  • Economics Honors Seminar I
  • Intermediate Microeconomic Theory

     University of Maryland, College Park:

  • Introduction to Macroeconomics
  • Development Economics