Overview

The modern business world is characterized by rapid change, in the form of globalization, technological advancements and increased customer expectations.

By studying our Business Economics course, you will have the opportunity to focus on the application of economics to situations related to commerce and enterprise. By exploring a range of analytical and quantitative tools that can be applied to business situations through our ‘Economists Toolkit’ modules, you should be able to gain the skills to help companies in a variety of sectors make informed decisions.

Through a focus on contemporary business economic debates and the applications of economics, our course aims to help you to develop the quantitative skills and real-world expertise to support your potential future employability upon successful graduation. Former graduates of the course have gone on to find successful careers in areas such as management, consultancy and the civil service.

Course information

The Business Economics course is one of three pathways we offer in Economics; the others being Economics and Financial Economics.

For greater flexibility, all of our Economics courses have a common first year. This gives you the chance to experience and achieve a thorough grounding in economic concepts and principles, along with relevant quantitative techniques and skills, before you make your decision about which area you’d like to specialize in, depending on your interests or potential future career aspirations.

In the first year, you will have the opportunity to study core subjects including microeconomics, macroeconomics, mathematics and statistics. The second and final years will provide you with the chance to gain a deeper understanding of the business sector, seeing how economic concepts can be applied to understand the structure of markets, the key factors that influence firms’ pricing decisions, the determination of wages across different occupations and the organizational structure of businesses.

Given the importance of human resources within organizations, we place an emphasis on the theoretical and empirical tools developed by economists to analyze the employment relationship. You will have the opportunity to analyze in detail a select number of human resource issues, such as compensation schemes, performance measures, training, discrimination and the impact of government programmes. Traditional analysis of principal-agent theory will be complemented by evaluating recent developments in behavioral economics that focus on the psychology of incentives, including the effect of bonuses and price rates on productivity, and what makes a good performance measure.