ECON 521
Incentives and Development Policy
Last Offered Spring 2020
Division II
Cross-listed
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Why isn’t the whole world developed? This course (and instructor) is of the opinion that the difficulty of getting incentives right is the key source of inefficiency. The course therefore studies how limited enforcement and asymmetric information constrain development, and about innovative development designs that attempt to overcome these constraints. The course readings will be a mix of field studies, empirical evidence and theoretical tools from game theory. Incentive and corruption problems in health, education, the regulation of banks and natural monopolies, privatization, budgeting, debt forgiveness, foreign aid, microfinance, climate treaties and ethnic violence will be studied using a unified framework. Note: this course was developed to address issues that arise in the countries represented at the CDE.