Industrial Organization
Industrial Organization—the study of imperfectly competitive markets—has a particularly strong tradition at Yale. Many of the central ideas of the field were developed at Yale, and many of the field’s top scholars were trained here.
There is a large and diverse “IO” faculty at Yale, distributed across the Economics Department, the Yale School of Management, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the Yale School of Public Health. Unusually harmonious relations across fields within Economics have also made Yale an attractive place for faculty and students whose research interests combine insights and analytical tools from IO with questions traditionally viewed as within the realms of other fields—e.g., the economics of education, health care, development, or the environment. The Cowles Foundation supports a Research Program in Industrial Organization, providing direct research support to students and faculty, support for an annual research conference, and support for academic visitors.
Seminars
A central element of the Yale research environment in IO is a weekly seminar, organized jointly between the Yale Economics Department and Yale School of Management. The seminar meets Tuesdays, from 2:30-4:00 pm in the Yale School of Management. Preceding the seminar is an IO Faculty Lunch, in which visiting scholars meet with IO faculty from around Yale to discuss current topics in the field.
Graduate Teaching and Research
The second-year PhD sequence in IO at Yale comprises two courses, Economics 600 and 601. Students in this sequence are given a firm grounding in the tools of frontier research in IO and the wide range of challenging research questions studied by IO economists and others concerned with the nuances that determine market outcomes under imperfect competition. This sequence is typically taken by students with a wide range of research interests. More advanced students focused on IO research participate in a weekly IO Prospectus seminar, meeting Thursdays at noon in room B1. Here students present work in progress to their peers and the IO faculty for feedback.