Economics - Minor

The Department of Economics at CU Boulder is recognized as a very high quality research and teaching department.

Economics is a quantitative, policy oriented social science with a highly developed body of theory and a wide range of real-world applications. Economists seek to describe the process by which societies use scarce resources to attain societal goals and predict the consequences of changes in those processes. Theoretical models, understanding of economic and policy making institutions, quantitative analysis and the examination of data are all part of this field of knowledge.

In general, economists are interested in the economic behavior of individuals. Investigations of the daily decisions that consumers, workers and firm managers make, as well as the interactions of such economic decisions in markets, constitute the subject of microeconomics. Macroeconomics refers to the analysis of economic activity of individuals aggregated over many markets. Some of the specific issues of macroeconomics include economic growth, inflation, recession and unemployment. Finally, international economics investigates the interrelationships among different economies and, in particular, studies the pattern of trade and payments between countries.

Faculty fields of specialization include international trade/finance, natural resource and environmental economics, public economics, urban and regional economics, development economics, labor economics and demography, political economics, economic history, industrial organization/game theory and econometrics.

The Department of Economics offers a minor. It is open to any student enrolled at CU Boulder, regardless of college or school, except for those pursuing an individually structured major or a major in distributed studies.

Requirements

Program Requirements

Completion of the minor requires a minimum of 20 credit hours in economics.

All coursework applied to the minor must be completed with a grade of C- or better. No pass/fail work may be applied. The GPA for all minor coursework must equal 2.00 or higher.

Students will be allowed to apply no more than 9 credit hours, including 6 upper-division credit hours, of transfer work toward a minor. If transferred coursework includes replacements for ECON 2010 or ECON 2020 that are fewer than a combined 7 credit hours for both courses, an additional upper-division elective will be added to the requirements for a minor.

Students may elect to take the 3000-level ECON courses that are designed for non-economics majors (e.g., ECON 3403, ECON 3535, ECON 3545, ECON 3616 and ECON 3784).

ECON 3070, ECON 3080 and all 4000-level ECON courses require a prerequisite of calculus. Students may take the following courses to meet this prerequisite: ECON 1088, MATH 1330 or APPM 1350.

Required Courses and Credits