Wheelan, Charles. Introduction to Public Policy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2011.  ISBN: 978-0-393-14982-1

EC302: Economics of Public Policy provides an in-depth analysis of selected government policy issues using the tools of microeconomic theory.  Prerequisite: EC202: Microeconomics

Upon successful completion of the course, each participant should be able to:

1. Identify the key elements of the public policy process and the institutions that are involved in achieving public policy goals;
2. Understand the key challenges to achieving effective public policies as well as the sources of disagreement of public policies;
3. Appreciate the challenges of aggregating individual preferences when it comes to providing goods through the government;
4. Appreciate the difference between the traditional economics approach to explaining human behavior and the behavioral economics approach, and identify the policy prescriptions that are likely to flow from each approach;
5. Understand the implications of group behavior and collective action for the formulation of public policies;
6. Understand the problems that are involved in evaluating social welfare and the tradeoff between equity and efficiency;
7. Appreciate the forces that influence the outcomes in political process;
8. Understand the advantages of using markets to allocate resources and the importance of productivity in determining standards of living;
9. Describe the different ways in which markets may fail to deliver efficient outcomes and the ways in which government can correct for those failures;
10. Understand the basics of gathering and measuring information;
11. Understand the process of hypothesis testing and the data problems that can complicate that process;
12. Describe the steps that go into cost-benefit analysis;
13. Appreciation the complications of doing program evaluations;
14. Understand the crucial role of effective institutions in formulating and implementing good public policies;
15. Appreciate the mechanism that are available to policymakers for changing behavior;
16. Analyze a series of different public policy problems;
17. Explore in detail and weigh the costs and benefits of the solutions to  particular public policy issue.