ELP 7460 - Advanced Educational Finance and Economics

This course introduces basic economic concepts, discusses how they are applied to analyze K12 education policies, understand the incentives created by a policy, and predict its intended and unintended consequences. The course will be organized around major issue areas in contemporary education policy. Topics that will be covered are school finance, educational resources and student outcomes, accountability, teacher labor market, cost-effectiveness of educational programs, and school choice. Many of the readings are original quantitative studies and time will be spent to read and interpret quantitative results; learn to distinguish between good and bad empirical research; discuss the key challenges in education research and methodologies that overcome them.