All Economics Courses
Understanding the Great Recession
This course explores the causes of the Great Recession, the recession's impact on local policy discussions, and how planners should think about economic impacts when thinking about long-term plans.
Economic Impact Analysis in Land Use Planning
This course examines how input-output models contribute to economic impact analyses and presents examples of how economic impact analysis can be applied in a wide range of planning projects.
Understanding Fiscal Impact Analyses
This course will explore the various elements of a fiscal impact analysis, particularly as it relates to residential projects.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accounting for Cities
Greenhouse gas emissions accounting is a core tool for developing, implementing, and monitoring climate actions and strategies. This course provides a basic overview of concepts that can be supplemented with training in specific software.
Calculating the Benefits of Parks, Trails, and Open Space
This course provides examples of how to calculate market and non-market values of parks, trails, and open space, as well as how to identify potential revenue-generating opportunities for long-term maintenance and operation.
Land Use Planning to Support Economic Development
This course provides a general understanding of macro level socio-economic and related business and industry trends likely to influence economic development plans and associated land use policies over the next twenty years.
Multi-Family Property Valuation Case Study for Planners
This course will take planners through a case study multi-family property valuation. The course will build upon previous course topics of time discounting, internal rate of return, net operating income, lease structures, debt payments, and risk assessment.
Office Property Valuation Case Study for Planners
This course offers a case study of office property valuation, building upon topics from previous courses, including time discounting, internal rate of return, net operating income, lease structures, debt payments, and risk assessment.
Real Estate Debt for Planners
This course introduces planners to basic concepts of real estate debt, including metrics used in obtaining a mortgage and other concepts like borrowing capacity, and amortization analysis.
Property Valuation for Planners
This course builds on topics covered in the previous two courses from this series, time value of money and property cash flow, to undertake a discounted cash flow analysis of property value.
Property Cash Flow Analysis for Planners
This course will introduce planners to property cash flow analysis, which provides the foundation for real estate pro forma analysis.
Time Value of Money for Planners
This course will introduce planners to the concept of time value of money that will provide the foundation for real estate pro forma analysis.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Local Government and Governance
This course uses economic thinking to investigate local government. The course includes discussions of public goods, market failure, private communities, and homevoter cities.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Cities, Externalities, and Governance
Through history, people have become better off as they urbanized. This course investigates how and why the quality of life has improved in cities.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Economics of the Environment
This course provides an introduction to environmental economics by exploring the economic effects of national and local environmental policies. By the end of the course, you'll understand market failure, externalities, and private and social costs, applying these concepts to issues like recycling, species preservation, and climate change.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Supply and Demand
"Supply and demand" is one of the most fundamental concepts of economic thinking. The familiar supply and demand curves are seemingly simple, but in reality, the relationship between supply in demand is complex.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Gains from Trade, Labor, and Immigration
This course focuses on the example of the Prisoner's Dilemma to illustrate the fact that gains from trade opportunities are lost if transactions and/or communications costs are high, property rights and contracting rules are not enforced, and levels of trust are low.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Overview
This course shows how "Economic Thinking" can inform our thinking on big questions like why some countries are rich while some are poor and how so many us have become so much better off than our ancestors.
Ethics: Balancing a Business Friendly Planning Environment, Part 2
Over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, has increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning departments amid shrinking budgets. As business interests engage and influence public agencies and planning strategy, the role of ethics is of increasing importance for the practicing planner. This is the second of a two-part series that evaluates and analyses the role of planners, from public window staff to department heads, in an increasingly business-friendly environment.
Introductory Population Analysis with Excel
Whether you're new to population analysis or just need a refresher, this course offers a comprehensive overview of the steps necessary to conduct analysis and develop projections using publicly available data. The course reviews Census data and builds skills, such as population projection, cohort survival, and concentration calculations that are essential for every professional in the planning and design community.