Department of Economics

Princeton has one of the finest economics departments in the world. There are about 50 full-time faculty in the department, including those who have joint appointments in the Woodrow Wilson School. Our alumni include Jack Bogle ’51, the founder of Vanguard Funds; Professor Alan Blinder ’67, a former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (1993–94) and vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (1994-–96); Gregory Mankiw ’80, chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2003–05); John Taylor ’68, undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (2001–05); Edward Glaser ’88, a chaired professor at Harvard; Halbert White ’72, a professor at the University of California–San Diego; and Jeremy Stein ’83, a professor at Harvard University and Jeff Zwiebel ’87, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, both winners of the Halbert White ’72 Prize in Economics.

Economics at Princeton is regarded and taught as part of a liberal education, not as a preparation for a specific vocation. However, it does provide an especially relevant background for careers in business and government and graduate study in economics, public policy, business administration, and law. The curriculum is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge necessary to understand the operation of a modern economy, to think and write clearly about economic problems and policy issues, and to analyze economic data. The departmental faculty have a variety of interests, which allows the Department of Economics to offer a wide range of courses.

Prospective concentrators should start by taking (or getting advanced placement out of) Economics 100 (microeconomics), 101 (macroeconomics), and 202 (statistics), and Mathematics 103 (calculus), which are prerequisites for entering the department and for most upper-level courses. These prerequisites must be completed no later than the sophomore year. They must be taken on a graded basis, not P/D/F, and you must have grades of C- or better on every one of these courses.

Core courses in microeconomics (300 or 310) and macroeconomics (301 or 311) continue to develop the foundations of 100 and 101. These courses are required of concentrators and count as two of the eight required departmentals. It is a good idea to take them early, by the fall of your junior year, because they are useful in other courses and in independent work. However, many other upper-level courses do not have the core courses as prerequisites so you can take those electives concurrently with the core courses.

The prerequisite course in statistics (Economics 202) is followed by the third core (and departmental) course, namely econometrics (Economics 302 or 312). This should be taken in the fall of your junior year. ORF 245 may be taken in place of Economics 202, but other courses in statistics such as Psychology 251 are not acceptable substitutes.

If you want to spend a junior semester abroad, you should plan sufficiently far ahead and take the appropriate core courses in your sophomore year, which in turn may require taking some prerequisites in your freshman year. We will not allow you to take core courses abroad, unless you are going to a university whose economics faculty is comparable to ours and which offers core courses of comparable quality and depth. Spending a semester abroad in your senior year is almost always infeasible, as that will affect your progress on your senior thesis very adversely.

Economics is an analytic and quantitative field. While the only mathematics requirement for economics concentrators is MAT 103, students are encouraged to take additional math courses—for example, up through Mathematics 200 or 201–202 or the equivalent. Students with this mathematical background can then take the higher-numbered versions of the core courses (310, 311, and 312), which make use of multivariable calculus and linear algebra.

The remainder of the required eight departmentals are generally completed by taking five courses from among other upper-level (300 and above) courses. There are courses ranging from those directly related to business and finance, such as Corporate Finance, to others involving topics of more general interest, such as International Economics and Labor Economics, to still others more suitable for the theoretically inclined student, such as the Economics of Uncertainty. It is possible, with prior approval, to count one and sometimes two courses from other departments toward the total required number of eight, provided these have substantial economics content and are relevant to your program of study in economics.

Economics concentrators are required to complete satisfactorily a year-long junior independent paper and a senior thesis. These are supervised by the faculty on a one-to-one basis. Applied topics are the most common, and many make use of econometric techniques. Therefore you are strongly recommended to include Econometric Applications (Economics 313) among your departmentals, taking it in the spring term of your junior year.

Some of the economics concentrators participate in a complementary certificate program, such as Bendheim Center’s Finance Certificate, the Program in Political Economy, the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, the Program in Engineering and Management Systems, and the Program in East Asian Studies. The finance certificate is a particularly popular option for economics concentrators, and you should review the description of that program for requirements.

A significant number of departmental juniors are successful in finding summer employment and internships, especially in the field of finance, and Princeton economics graduates go on to a variety of careers. About three-quarters begin working immediately after graduation, most commonly in the business world. Examples of the type of companies that often hire economics graduates are investment banking, consulting, and banking firms. Others go to graduate school in law, medicine, business, and economics, in some cases after two or three years of work experience. Students contemplating graduate school in economics should meet with a faculty adviser as early as possible in order to plan a program of study that provides the necessary training in mathematics and quantitative methods.