Microeconomics studies how individuals make decisions about labor supply, savings, and the pattern of consumption expenditures, how businesses make decisions about production, investment, and marketing, and how governments make decisions through various political mechanisms such as voting. Macroeconomics is about how these decisions combine to yield aggregate outcomes such as the level of national income and how it fluctuates over the business cycle, unemployment, income distribution, inflation, economic growth, and financial performance.

Economics provides a framework within which to understand, assess, and evaluate government actions such as tax and debt policies, regulatory policies, and social policies (e.g., social security, health insurance, etc.). How these policies affect the actions of individuals and business, the performance of markets, and the welfare of society as a whole, are central questions of economics.

Our broad goal at the undergraduate level is to provide students with the tools, language, and rigor to understand and contribute at a substantive level to economic dialogue in local, national, and international settings. For those who wish to pursue further studies in the field, we aim to lay a sound theoretical and empirical foundation that will serve as the basis for advanced study.