Urban and Regional Analysis

This concentration is designed to prepare students with a set of skills that are directly useful in public sector economic analyses, either as governmental employees such as in state and regional planning organizations, or for the many consulting firms that serve the public sector in nearly every aspect of public service delivery, expenditure, taxation and finance.

Most students choose electives from within the Economics department (SAS for Economists being a strongly encouraged course). Other recommended courses as electives are Financial Tools from the Finance Department in the College of Business, and Optimization Models from the Department of Quantitative Analysis in the COB. Students interested in public investment problems have taken Transportation Demand Forecasting courses offered by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering. Students interested in locational issues have taken advanced electives from the the Department of Geography, such as Location Theory and GIS, Urban-Economic Applications.

At the end of this concentration, the student should feel very comfortable stepping into a analyst position in any public sector planning and economic analysis organization, as well as any consulting firm that serves the public sector.

Concentration Course Descriptions

Economics 570—Regional Economics
Introduction to conceptual, statistical, and empirical applications of spatial variation in economic outcomes. Theory of industrial location choice, agglomeration theory, industrial clusters, central place theory in theoretical and empirical explanations for the spatial structure of cities. Analysis of spatial data and modeling of regional economies and their interrelations.

Economics 676-Applied Benefit-Cost Analysis
A high-level introduction to the major issues and techniques in evaluation of programs and projects with the tools of applied microeconomics. Topics include measurement of benefits and costs, discounting, project ranking criteria, and uncertainty analysis.
Prerequisite: Economics 651 and 673 or permission of instructor.

Economics 677—Applied Economic Forecasting
This course covers the standard forecasting techniques used by professional economists in business and government. Topics include properties of time-series data, trend-line fitting, ARIMA models, and autoregressions.
Prerequisite: Economics 673 or permission of instructor.

Economics 678—Applied Qualitative and Limited Dependent Variable Models
Many applications in economics have dependent variables that are qualitative or limited in some way. This course introduces the student to binary choice models, multinomial choice models, ordered choice models, count models, censored dependent variable models, and more. Emphasis is on application and interpretation.
Prerequisite: Economics 672 or permission of instructor.

Economics 680—Spatial Econometrics
This course covers the theoretical foundations of spatial econometrics as well as a series of examples from applied research using models of regional and urban economic, economic growth, population-employment dynamics, land use, hedonic pricing models, the effect of environmental policy on foreign direct investment, etc. The course provides interactive demonstration of spatial software for exploratory and econometric analyses. Software includes GeoDa and Matlab.

Geography 580—Introduction to Geographic Information Systems
Essential elements of a GIS; hardware requirements; GIS software; data acquisition; data structures; spatial databases; methods of data analysis and spatial modeling; applications of GIS to a variety of environmental and urban economic problems. GIS packages such as ArcView and Idrisi are used in the course.

Bacon