International Trade

ECON 331 asks why countries trade at all and who wins or loses when they do, building a toolkit of models — Ricardian comparative advantage, Heckscher-Ohlin factor endowments, specific factors, and increasing-returns frameworks — that each answer that question from a different angle before turning to what tariffs and trade policy actually do in practice. The work is project-based: three assignments push you from theory into empirics, culminating in the gravity model where predictions meet real trade data. It sits downstream of intermediate micro and macro and pairs naturally with open-economy macro, giving you the lens to read trade-war headlines, WTO disputes, and globalization debates as economics rather than politics.