Outcomes
In order to successfully complete this course, the student will:
1. Contrast economic theory to other social sciences;
2. Describe how economics relates to political systems;
3. Investigate how economists apply the methods of science;
4. Employ mathematical tools to formulate or validate political arguments;
5. Apply the economic perspective;
6. Reason accurately and objectively about economic topics;
7. Explain the difference between positive and normative statements;
8. Compare macroeconomics to microeconomics.
9. Examine the determinants of supply and demand in a market and use to construct supply and demand schedules and graphs;
10. Analyze the nature of a competitive market;
11. Examine the role of economics in government’s policy formulation;
12. Examine the key role of prices in allocating scare resources in market economies;
13. Describe market equilibrium;
14. Analyze how policy makers and businesses use demand and supply elasticity to determine the effect of a price change on a market;
15. Compare and contrast the effects of government policies that place price ceilings or price floors on goods or services;
16. Analyze the role of the federal, state or local governments in development and implementation of taxes and evaluate the implications on related systems, society and on individuals;
17. Compute tax incidence and explain how it impacts producers and consumers;
18. Define and measure consumer and producer surplus and evaluate the impact of the deadweight loss caused by taxes;
19. Examine why some taxes have larger deadweight losses than others and how tax revenue and deadweight loss vary with the size of the tax;
20. Define externality and examine its impact on market outcomes;
21. Analyze government policies aimed at solving the problem of externalities;
22. Compare the characteristics of competitive, monopoly, oligopoly, and monopolistic competitive markets and calculate how the different types of competition determine how much to produce, when to shut down, when to enter and when to exit a market.
23. Describe how the development of international trade benefits individuals and groups;
24. Apply the theory of comparative advantage to everyday life and an individual’s well-being;
25. Examine the short-term and long-term impacts of changing prices on demand and supply;
26. Explain how cost of production change when viewed in the short- or long-term;
27. Describe the history of antitrust laws and explain how they try to foster competition;
28. Describe how advertising growth over time has helped monopolistically competitive firms establish real or perceived differences in their products.
29. Graph supply and demand schedules;
30. Calculate elasticities;
31. Calculate comparative advantage and absolute advantage in international trading relationships,
32. Construct a model of a nation’s production possibilities;
33. Construct a model of the flow of factors of production and their outputs;
34. Calculate total revenue, marginal revenue, and average revenue, and costs of production for perfectly competitive, monopolistically competitive, oligopolistic, and monopolistic firms including fixed, variable, total, average fixed, average variable, average total and marginal cost;
35. Recognize the cost curves by their shapes when plotted and understand their relationships to one another
36. Analyze the impact of government intervention in the market system and how this intervention impacts diverse populations.
37. Specifically describe the effects of minimum wage laws, rent control, crop subsidies, and other government imposed price ceilings and floors on diverse socioeconomic groups.
Course articulated with UW. Contact instructor for articulated textbook.