This page is divided into four sections. The first section is a biographical section, including my current research interest, and a link to my CV.  The second contains courses I teach, including courses for the current semester. This section includes links to syllabi of the courses. The third section has important links to internet sites, especially sites concerned with economics and demography.  

1.  Biography and Current Interests

I have taught at Clark University since 1976. During that time I have served as a professor in the Department of Economics, and as Associate Provost. At the present time my research is focused on the impact of Long-Term Care Insurance on the behavior of disabled elderly and on counseling seniors for home equity conversion.  My earlier research has been conducted in the areas of monetary economics, housing finance, and home equity conversion for the elderly.

 The courses I teach are described in the second section of this page. The regular and usual suspects include introductory economics, monetary economics, and economic demography.

My curriculum vitae can be viewed from this location.

The department of economics regularly offers a first-year seminar. For the Fall 2007 semester the subject of the seminar is the Economics of World Population. The course serves both as an introduction to Economics and to Demography. It investigates how economic factors affect the size and distribution of world population, as well as how demographic factors influence economic well-being. ECON100 is a substitute for ECON010. Fulfills the Global Perspective requirement.
 

At one time this course was titled The Economics of Money and Banking. The change in titles is meaningful.

The economics of money is no longer the economics of banking (only).  Money has changed over the last ten years, and banking has changed even more. Today's money in the U.S. has changed its form appreciably, and this refers to much more than the appearance of the new bills and dollar coins. Today's money is new in form and function from its recent predecessor. And if money is different, that hardly holds a candle to the changes that have been taking place in the domain of banks and other financial institutions.

One thing is certain about Econ 113 -- its content is going to be different each time the course is taught. The principles of monetary economics may be fairly stable, but the institutions and applications are not.

Econ 10 is the basic and introductory course in economics. It is intended to cover the elements of economics and to do so in the context of social problems and social concerns. This course introduces the vital contribution economics can make to an understanding of how society operates by comparing the methods used for resource allocation in different economic systems. The course develops basic economic concepts through comparisons across countries, over time, and for different goods, rather than by emphasizing economic theory. These economic concepts are then applied to a variety of important current policy issues. Fulfills the global comparative perspective.

    Economics 247 Economics of Population

Econ 247 is a survey of economic demography. It covers elements of the theory of demography and integrates those elements into economics. It is designed for advanced undergraduates with a good understanding of elementary economics. For more information on the course and course requirements consult the syllabus.

Syllabus for Econ 247

It might be fair to say that the corpus of economics rests on a base of microeconomic theory, but much of economics is heavily dependent on the analysis of aggregate variables. This is the subject of macroeconomics. Econ 206 is devoted to the analysis of the determinants of income, employment and the price level, and to the study of changes in those variables. The formal development of the subject was heavily influenced (during the 1930s) by the conditions prevailing in the economic world. Today, in 2004, the state of the world remains the stimulus to the study of macroeconomics. How is it that seemingly similar economies can be so different in their aggregate economic well-being? How can policy alter the macroeconomic equilibria of nations, in the short and in the longer-run? Are there trade-offs between variables such as the level of employment and prices? These are the central questions of this course.

3.   Other Sites of Interest to Economists

There are a number of web sites that are either devoted to economics, or of interest to economists. The most comprehensive of such sites is Resources for Economists on the Internet.  This site contains links to a number of other sites and includes a table of contents. The only problem with it is that it is so large as to be daunting. A few smaller sites of general interest include the Economic Statistics Briefing Room (a site managed at the White House) http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/esbr.html, the home page of the Federal Reserve System http://www.federalreserve.gov/, and then, just to insert one site that is simply interesting, consider the Marketplace site.