Public Economics · Economics
I learned a lot about tax structures, tax policies, and a little bit about corporate taxes.
public finance, government revenues and expenditure, development policy
General knowledge about taxation and redistribution, governments' economic planning for things like healthcare
A problem set about every two weeks, so not awful. Grading for psets was on a weird scale I remember. Exams were medium difficulty and based off homework more or less.
Four written problem sets, insane midterm and final. No recitations (except to review the problem sets after you hand them in and useless 'exam review sessions').
Generally light. The ony assigned reading was two journal articles and there were about 6 or 7 short but tricky problem sets. The average (not sure if it was mean or median) on the midterm was 37/80, but some scores were in the 55-65 range (these grades were As). Grading seemed harsh but you'll probably get the same grade as your other classes.
- General tax policy (credits, deductions, empirical evidence on how they are helpful)
All about Public Economics, saw that there are several ways to look at government projects and how to evaluate their success.
Up there as one of the worst professors I've had at Columbia. He didn't make an effort to make class interesting or worth attending, and he certainly didn't make an effort to seem like he cared about his students. He was rather rude or callous at times to my own and my peers' concern about homework or exams. I took this class against the recommend of a friend, and I would not recommend it to others. At the same time, the material isn't horribly difficult to understand. This class probably ranks as an average to above average difficulty class in terms of economics electives depending on the person. Again, prof = bad.
If you should see his name come up and consider taking his class, don't. He was visiting Spring 2012. Exams are quite challenging, grading is pretty unreasonable, and he reads from slides so you can skip lecture, which I consider to be a terrible use of $4,000 and 10 weeks of one's life. Full disclosure, I'm in GS with all A's in econ. I got a B+ in the end but nearly 100 on all the problem sets and worked my tail off for the exams. No idea how you get an A but I have never consistently fallen asleep in a class at Columbia before this so aside from being surprised by the grade in the aftermath, I was fairly disappointed with the whole experience. It was a large lecture class but the attention from the TA's was lackluster and certainly didn't make up for the subpar leadership.