Free online course Public Economics: Taxation, Social Insurance, Public Goods and Corporate Tax Policy
Duration of the online course: 32 hours and 4 minutes
New
Learn how taxes, social insurance, public goods and corporate policy shape real markets in this free online course—build analytical skills for policy and business.
In this free course, learn about
Conditions for Pareto efficiency in competitive markets (First Welfare Theorem)
Tax incidence in partial equilibrium: role of demand/supply elasticities
Make smarter decisions about policy, business strategy, and economic debates by learning how governments raise revenue, insure risks, provide public goods, and tax corporations. This free online course builds a practical, analytical framework for understanding what taxes really do to prices, wages, investment, and behavior, and why the same policy can look fair on paper yet produce unexpected results in the real economy.
You will develop the ability to reason clearly about who ultimately bears the burden of a tax, why efficiency costs arise, and how economists measure welfare changes when markets are imperfect. The course connects foundational ideas like Pareto efficiency and optimal taxation to modern evidence, showing how researchers identify causal effects using methods such as difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity. Rather than relying on slogans, you learn to read results critically, spot fragile assumptions, and interpret empirical findings in a way that translates to policy choices.
A key strength of the course is the bridge it builds between theory and applied public finance. You will explore how labor supply responds to income taxes, why taxable income can be more informative than hours worked, and what frictions and real-world constraints imply for estimating elasticities. You will also examine social insurance programs through the lens of asymmetric information and incentives, clarifying trade-offs behind unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and screening mechanisms.
The course then broadens to collective action problems, including externalities and public goods, equipping you to evaluate climate tools, retirement plan design, and the logic of efficient provision. Finally, corporate tax policy is analyzed with an eye toward investment incentives, shifting tax bases, effective rates, and international considerations, offering insight into why revenues can fall even when headline rates barely move. By the end, you will have a sharper, more professional toolkit for assessing tax and spending proposals with confidence and nuance.
Course content
Video class: Topic 1: Introduction | Economics 2450A: Public Economics57m
Exercise: Which set of conditions is required for the private market outcome to be Pareto efficient according to the first welfare theorem?
Video class: Topic 2: Tax Incidence Part 1 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h20m
Exercise: In a standard competitive partial-equilibrium model, what mainly determines who bears more of a commodity tax (economic incidence)?
Video class: Topic 2: Tax Incidence Part 2 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h17m
Exercise: In a difference-in-differences (DD) study of state cigarette tax changes, what is the key identifying assumption needed to interpret the DD estimate causally?
Video class: Topic 2: Tax Incidence Part 3 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h24m
Exercise: In an open-economy model with highly mobile capital and immobile labor, who bears the burden of a small country’s capital tax?
Video class: Topic 3: Efficiency Cost of Taxation Part 1 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h06m
Exercise: Under what condition is the Marshallian surplus triangle a valid welfare measure for the efficiency cost of a tax?
Video class: Topic 3: Efficiency Cost of Taxation Part 2 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h17m
Exercise: In a setting with pre-existing taxes in other markets, why can a single-market Harberger deadweight loss calculation be highly misleading for a small new tax (e.g., a small gasoline tax)?
Video class: Topic 3: Efficiency Cost of Taxation Part 3 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h13m
Exercise: In public economics, what best characterizes a reduced form approach compared with sufficient-statistic methods?
Video class: Topic 4: Optimal Taxation Part 1 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h20m
Exercise: In the Ramsey approach to optimal commodity taxation, why is the assumption that at least one commodity cannot be taxed important?
Video class: Topic 4: Optimal Taxation Part 2 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h03m
Exercise: In the Laffer-curve calculation with a constant linear tax rate, what is the revenue-maximizing tax rate when taxable income has an uncompensated elasticity ε with respect to the net-of-tax rate (1−t)?
Video class: Topic 4: Optimal Taxation Part 3 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics55m
Exercise: When is a work subsidy like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) more likely to be optimal in an optimal tax model with labor supply responses?
Video class: Topic 5: Income Taxation and Labor Supply part 1 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h27m
Exercise: Why do modern empirical studies often use tax reforms as instruments when estimating labor supply elasticities?
Video class: Topic 5: Income Taxation and Labor Supply part 2 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h15m
Exercise: What is the main reason the electricity evidence suggests that lack of bunching at kinks is not primarily due to a small structural elasticity?
Video class: Topic 5: Income Taxation and Labor Supply part 3 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h16m
Exercise: Why can a temporary one-year elimination of income taxes generate an especially large estimated labor supply elasticity?
Video class: Topic 5: Income Taxation and Labor Supply part 4 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics59m
Exercise: Why do many modern public finance studies focus on estimating taxable income elasticities rather than hours-work elasticities?
Video class: Topic 5: Income Taxation and Labor Supply part 5 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics57m
Exercise: How does the size of a price (or tax) change affect the ability to infer the structural elasticity when small frictions are present?
Video class: Topic 6: Social Insurance Part 1 | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h22m
Exercise: In the Rothschild–Stiglitz model with asymmetric information about risk types, what typically happens in a separating equilibrium?
Video class: Topic 6: Social Insurance Part 2 | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h01m
Exercise: In the second-best optimal unemployment insurance problem, what key trade-off determines the optimal benefit level?
Video class: Topic 6: Social Insurance Part 3 | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h12m
Exercise: In the moral hazard vs. liquidity framework for unemployment insurance, what does the liquidity effect capture?
Video class: Topic 6: Social Insurance Part 4 (Guest Lecture) | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h21m
Exercise: What is the positive correlation test commonly used to detect in insurance markets?
Video class: Topic 6: Social Insurance Part 5 | Econ2450A: Public Economics58m
Exercise: In a regression discontinuity (RD) study of unemployment benefit extensions, what feature identifies the causal effect of eligibility on unemployment duration?
Video class: Topic 6: Social Insurance Part 6 | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h20m
Exercise: Why is screening (and related hassle costs/waiting periods) especially important in disability insurance (DI) compared with unemployment insurance (UI)?
Video class: Topic 7: Public Goods and Externalities Part 1 | Econ2450A: Public Economics59m
Exercise: Under uncertainty about pollution abatement costs, what determines whether a price instrument (tax) or a quantity instrument (cap) is preferred?
Video class: Topic 7: Public Goods and Externalities Part 2 | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h05m
Exercise: Why can automatic enrollment in retirement plans increase 401(k) participation without changing anyone’s budget set?
Video class: Topic 7: Public Goods and Externalities Part 3 | Econ2450A: Public Economics1h15m
Exercise: In the model of a pure public good, what does the Samuelson rule state at the Pareto-efficient allocation?
Video class: Topic 8: Corporate Taxation Part 1 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics27m
Exercise: In the new view (cash-rich, internally financed) model of corporate taxation, which tax change affects the firm’s investment decision?
Video class: Topic 8: Corporate Taxation Part 2 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h17m
Exercise: Why have U.S. corporate tax revenues fallen sharply as a share of GDP even though the statutory corporate tax rate has changed little?
Video class: Topic 8: Corporate Taxation Part 3 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics1h15m
Exercise: How can the effective (marginal) tax rate on dividends be inferred when investors face different dividend tax rates?
Video class: Topic 8: Corporate Taxation Part 4 | Economics 2450A: Public Economics34m
Exercise: Under a worldwide tax system with deferral, what incentive does taxing repatriations at the difference between the foreign tax rate and the domestic corporate rate create?
Economic incidence depends mainly on relative supply and demand elasticities: the less elastic side of the market bears more of the tax burden.
What is the key trade-off in setting unemployment insurance benefits?
Optimal benefits balance consumption smoothing for unemployed workers against weaker incentives to search for and accept jobs.
When should policymakers use a carbon tax rather than an emissions cap?
A tax is generally preferred when the welfare cost of getting the emissions quantity wrong is small relative to uncertainty in abatement costs; the reverse favors a cap.
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