Master 2024/2025

Labor and Personnel Economics

Type: Elective course (Economics and Economic Policy)

Area of studies: Economics

Delivered by: Department of Applied Economics

Where: Faculty of Economic Sciences

When: 2 year, 3 module

Mode of studies: offline

Open to: students of one campus

Instructors: Sergey Solntsev

Master’s programme: Economics and Economic policy

Language: English

ECTS credits: 3

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The course covers main concepts and discusses recent advances in Labour and Personnel Economics, with an emphasis on the interaction between theory and empirics. We will discuss theoretical and empirical methods applied in this field of economics. The course is appropriate for graduate students with basic knowledge of microeconomic theory and econometrics. The course starts by discussing principles of the labour market analyses and the labour market flows. It proceeds to cover theories of labour supply and demand, and economic research analyzing human capital accumulation and wage differences. The second part of the course - Personnel Economics - covers various aspects of the relationship between employer and employees. The topics discussed include employee motivation, incentive contracts, career incentives, problems of searching, hiring and firing the employees, structure of compensation, human resource management practices. The aim of this course is not only to provide a comprehensive discussion of the current state of research in the fields of Labour and Personnel Economics, but also to show students how to apply the skills acquired in microeconomic theory and econometrics courses to real-world topics. Labour and Personnel Economics is a dynamic area of modern economics. It combines ideas and methods from a number of fields, including microeconomics, contract theory, micro-econometrics, behavioral and experimental economics. We will be using a couple of textbooks but the course material is primarily based on recent research papers published in leading economics journals.