Labor Economics

Labor economics applies the supply-and-demand toolkit you learned in intermediate micro to the market where the "good" being traded is human time and effort, which makes prices (wages) entangled with decisions about schooling, family, migration, and discrimination. You'll work through the Ehrenberg-Smith text chapter by chapter and demonstrate mastery on two written midterms plus a final, mostly by deriving how workers and firms respond to wage changes, policy interventions, and frictions, and then judging whether observed outcomes like wage gaps or unemployment reflect those mechanisms. It's the natural applied follow-up to micro theory and a useful bridge into public economics, development, and any empirical work where human capital and earnings show up.