Free online coursePublic Economics: Taxation, Social Insurance, Public Goods and Corporate Tax Policy

Course Description

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.