Intermediate microeconomics and macroeconomics
Multivariable calculus and constrained optimization
Probability and conditional expectations
Difference equations and eigenvalues; elementary differential equations for continuous-time items

Dynamic optimization and Ramsey equilibrium: 10 questions

Practice Dynamic optimization and Ramsey equilibrium

10 question families currently available:

Discrete Euler equation
Return accounting
Continuous consumption growth
Bellman state
Terminal restriction
Borrowing constraint
Ramsey versus golden rule
Saddle-path selection
Capital transition
Technology-growth normalization

Overlapping generations and dynamic efficiency: 10 questions

Practice Overlapping generations and dynamic efficiency

10 question families currently available:

Two-period saving
Population dilution
OLG return
A stationary OLG stock
Dynamic inefficiency criterion
Pay-as-you-go return
Finite lives and Ricardian equivalence
Old-age endowment
Land as another asset
Private optimality and efficiency

RBC models and equilibrium closure: 10 questions

Practice RBC models and equilibrium closure

10 question families currently available:

Competitive labor condition
RBC resource closure
Factor-price calculation
Predetermined capital
Productivity and hours ambiguity
Stochastic Euler pricing
Utilization and measured productivity
Calibration and identification
Government purchases in a resource constraint
Planner-equilibrium equivalence

Linearization and rational expectations: 10 questions

Practice Linearization and rational expectations

10 question families currently available:

Log-linear production
Linearizing a sum
Zero steady-state variables
Conditional forecasts
Forward solution
Root counting
Linearizing a gross return
Certainty-equivalent approximation
Forecast-error orthogonality
Linearizing accumulation

New Keynesian models: 10 questions

Practice New Keynesian models

10 question families currently available:

The New Keynesian IS equation
Phillips-curve arithmetic
Calvo duration
Natural output versus efficient output
Taylor principle mechanism
Lower-bound demand gap
Cost-push tradeoff
Expected inflation at a fixed nominal rate
Closing the NK model
Forward guidance dependence

Policy and time consistency: 10 questions

Practice Policy and time consistency

10 question families currently available:

Inflation bias under discretion
Commitment in the inflation-bias model
What creates time inconsistency
Discretionary cost-push stabilization
Commitment with forward-looking prices
Government debt arithmetic
Debt ratio stabilization
Ricardian equivalence conditions
Lucas critique
Capital levy timing

Game Theory: 60 questions

Practice Game Theory

Advanced undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate microeconomics, algebra and probability
Single-variable optimization for quantity competition and auctions
Convexity and compactness for existence questions; extensive-form reasoning for refinements

Strategic form, dominance, and rationalizability: 10 questions

Practice Strategic form, dominance, and rationalizability

10 question families currently available:

Strict dominance
Dominance by a mixture
Weak dominance and equilibrium
Iterated strict deletion
Best response to a belief
Affine utility transformations
Ordinal transformations under risk
Efficiency versus equilibrium
Rationalizability is not a realized forecast
Strategic interaction and external effects

Mixed Nash equilibrium and existence: 10 questions

Practice Mixed Nash equilibrium and existence

10 question families currently available:

Asymmetric matching pennies
Coordination equilibrium enumeration
Support must be optimal
Finite-game existence
Failure without compactness
Continuous pure-strategy existence
Cournot best responses
Zero-sum value
Indifference is not a mandate
Correlation and equilibrium concepts

Extensive form and subgame perfection: 10 questions

Practice Extensive form and subgame perfection

10 question families currently available:

Complete contingent plans
Entry and credible responses
Nash threats off the path
Information sets and subgames
Backward induction with ties
Stackelberg commitment
Observed commitment changes incentives
Perfect recall and randomization
One-shot deviation principle
Changing information changes the game

Repeated games and bargaining: 10 questions

Practice Repeated games and bargaining

10 question families currently available:

Finite repeated dominance
Grim-trigger threshold
Patience and the punishment payoff
Punishment credibility
Public randomization of continuation play
Folk-theorem qualification
Ultimatum with a specified tie rule
Two-round bargaining
Alternating-offer stationary shares
Nash bargaining with disagreement

Bayesian games and auctions: 10 questions

Practice Bayesian games and auctions

10 question families currently available:

Bayesian strategies specify types
Interim optimal entry
Bayes updating correlated types
A threshold Bayesian equilibrium
Second-price truthful bidding
First-price shading
Revenue in a second-price auction
Reserve-price outcome
Winner’s curse as selection
Revenue-equivalence limits

Signaling, beliefs, and refinements: 10 questions

Practice Signaling, beliefs, and refinements

10 question families currently available:

Bayesian beliefs on the path
Zero-probability messages
Receiver action threshold
Separating education incentives
Pooling and off-path deterrence
Incentives can defeat separation
Uninformative cheap talk
Sequential consistency and perturbations
A tremble eliminates a weak equilibrium
Refinement through deviation incentives

Monetary Economics: 60 questions

Practice Monetary Economics

Upper undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate microeconomics and macroeconomics
Calculus, constrained optimization and conditional expectations
Bank accounting and introductory econometrics

Monetary assets, payments and liquidity: 10 questions

Practice Monetary assets, payments and liquidity

10 question families currently available:

Liquidity services and asset returns
Cash timing restriction
Gross versus net settlement
Payment versus credit instrument
Liquidity premium arithmetic
Public liquidity under a pledgeability limit
Collateral haircut
A liquidity shortage without insolvency
Token acceptance externality
Reserve transfer accounting

Money demand and bank balance sheets: 10 questions

Practice Money demand and bank balance sheets

10 question families currently available:

Transaction-balance optimization
Money demand opportunity cost
Stable money demand and velocity
Conditional multiplier calculation
Loan origination entries
Capital constraint on lending
Deposit outflow and funding replacement
Run incentives and liquidation
Interest-sensitive money demand
Precautionary reserves

Policy instruments and transmission: 10 questions

Practice Policy instruments and transmission

10 question families currently available:

Corridor arbitrage bounds
Reserve satiation
Asset purchase from a nonbank
Duration channel with segmented demand
Term premium decomposition
Credit spread offset
Balance-sheet amplification
Policy implementation versus stance
Central-bank information signal
Reserve averaging incentive

Nominal contracts, inflation and information: 10 questions

Practice Nominal contracts, inflation and information

10 question families currently available:

Predetermined nominal wage
State-dependent price adjustment
Relative-price dispersion
Inflation versus price-level restoration
Indexation and inflation persistence
Inflation redistribution on nominal debt
Inflation tax on existing currency
Seigniorage and the tax base
Monetary neutrality counterexample
Bayesian updating about inflation

Stabilization with financial and policy constraints: 10 questions

Practice Stabilization with financial and policy constraints

10 question families currently available:

Lower bound with a lending wedge
Fiscal purchases with constrained households
Targeting a bank-specific panic
Collateral eligibility and policy access
Commitment backed by a reputational loss
Instrument uncertainty
Distributional effects of refinancing
Aggregate demand with offsetting balance-sheet effects
Price-level history dependence
Two targets and instrument rank

Identification and policy evaluation: 10 questions

Practice Identification and policy evaluation

10 question families currently available:

Policy reaction versus shock
Narrative identification exclusion
High-frequency surprise scaling
Weak first stage
Recursive ordering restriction
Local-projection horizon meaning
Post-treatment credit control
Anticipated announcements
Cumulative response accounting
Policy evaluation beyond point estimates

International Macroeconomics: 60 questions

Practice International Macroeconomics

Upper undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate microeconomics and macroeconomics
Calculus, present-value accounting and conditional expectations
Introductory econometrics

External accounts and intertemporal solvency: 10 questions

Practice External accounts and intertemporal solvency

10 question families currently available:

Current account components
Wealth changes beyond transactions
Income earned on inherited assets
Saving and investment
Consolidating sector balances
Two-date external feasibility
A stationary foreign liability
Growing debt and solvency
Gross flows and net borrowing
Net debtor with positive investment income

Small open economy consumption and investment: 10 questions

Practice Small open economy consumption and investment

10 question families currently available:

A temporary endowment windfall
News of future income
A persistent endowment improvement
World rates and investment
Investment financed abroad
The autarky interest rate
A binding external credit ceiling
Fiscal timing and the current account
Precautionary external saving
A rate increase for a net borrower

Real exchange rates and terms of trade: 10 questions

Practice Real exchange rates and terms of trade

10 question families currently available:

Computing a real exchange rate
Real versus nominal depreciation
Relative purchasing power parity
Nontraded services and appreciation
An absorption boom with nontradables
Terms of trade and purchasing power
Temporary versus permanent export-price news
Sticky prices and pass-through
A CPI real-rate index and competitiveness
Expenditure switching and timing

Nominal exchange rates and policy regimes: 10 questions

Practice Nominal exchange rates and policy regimes

10 question families currently available:

Exact covered interest parity
UIP and expected depreciation
A premium defined explicitly
A spot jump under fixed expectations
A credible peg with mobile capital
Sterilized reserve sales
Fixed nominal wages under a peg
Foreign liabilities and devaluation
Overshooting mechanism
Capital controls and policy autonomy

Crises, debt and capital flows: 10 questions

Practice Crises, debt and capital flows

10 question families currently available:

Sudden-stop resource adjustment
Reserves as temporary financing
Collateral-price feedback
A borrowing externality
Pricing a defaultable one-period bond
Recovery and the bond price
Default as an endogenous choice
Rollover risk without present-value insolvency
Reserve exhaustion under a peg
Gross exposure hidden by net positions

Risk sharing, identification and policy evaluation: 10 questions

Practice Risk sharing, identification and policy evaluation

10 question families currently available:

Complete-markets consumption shares
A noncontingent bond and insurance
Real exchange rates in the sharing condition
Consumption correlations and model rejection
Saving–investment correlations
Interpreting a UIP regression
A spread–output association
A world-price instrument
Evaluating a capital-control reform
Insurance with incentive effects

Causal Inference and Applied Econometrics: 60 questions

Practice Causal Inference and Applied Econometrics

Upper undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Introductory econometrics and regression
Conditional expectation and basic probability
Sampling uncertainty and algebra

Potential outcomes and estimands: 10 questions

Practice Potential outcomes and estimands

10 question families currently available:

Average effects in a finite population
ATT versus ATE
Observed difference decomposition
Observed potential outcome
Well-defined intervention
Spillovers and exposure
Quantile effects
Defining versus identifying
Policy-weighted heterogeneity
Binary-outcome bounds

Randomization and noncompliance: 10 questions

Practice Randomization and noncompliance

10 question families currently available:

Randomized assignment estimand
Intention-to-treat calculation
As-treated comparison
One-sided noncompliance
Randomization and imbalance
Differential attrition
Cluster assignment
Blocked assignment aggregation
Sharp-null randomization test
Adjusted experimental analysis

Selection and covariate adjustment: 10 questions

Practice Selection and covariate adjustment

10 question families currently available:

Conditional exchangeability
Standardization
Lack of overlap
Inverse probability weight
Post-treatment mediator
Collider selection
Matching target
Doubly robust estimation
Cross-fitting limitation
Trimming changes the target

Instrumental variables and local effects: 10 questions

Practice Instrumental variables and local effects

10 question families currently available:

Wald ratio
Who are compliers?
Exclusion restriction
Monotonicity content
Complier share
LATE versus population ATE
Weak first stage
Instrument-specific effects
Observed recipients are mixtures
Defiers change the ratio

Difference-in-differences and panels: 10 questions

Practice Difference-in-differences and panels

10 question families currently available:

Two-period difference-in-differences
Parallel trends content
Anticipation
Pretrend evidence
Fixed effects and time-varying confounding
Staggered adoption comparisons
Cohort-time target
Not-yet-treated controls
Aggregating cohort effects
Serial correlation in panels

Discontinuities, sensitivity and transport: 10 questions

Practice Discontinuities, sensitivity and transport

10 question families currently available:

Sharp RD estimand
Sharp RD calculation
Fuzzy RD ratio
Sorting around the cutoff
Bandwidth tradeoff
Density diagnostic limits
Sensitivity interval
Transport by effect modifiers
Unsupported target stratum
Scaling an intervention

Economics of Education: 60 questions

Practice Economics of Education

Undergraduate with advanced extensions

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Introductory microeconomics, algebra and probability
Introductory statistics; regression and causal inference for evaluation items
Derivatives and conditional normal updating for advanced items

Education investment and sequential choice: 10 questions

Practice Education investment and sequential choice

10 question families currently available:

Completion risk in college choice
Learning about fit before specialization
Continuation after sunk tuition
Complementarity across learning stages
A financing constraint at matriculation
Consumption value of study
Deferring enrollment under a known tuition change
Risk aversion and educational outcomes
Skill maintenance during a study break
A sequential enrollment decision

Returns, information and social benefits: 10 questions

Practice Returns, information and social benefits

10 question families currently available:

Private and social education benefits
A productivity test after credential disclosure
Credential escalation as a coordination problem
A graduation premium and competing mechanisms
Employment as part of education returns
An intervention that changes who enrolls
Relative skill supply in general equilibrium
A nonmarket benefit omitted from earnings
Fiscal return versus social return
An education externality and private choice

Schools, teachers and learning production: 10 questions

Practice Schools, teachers and learning production

10 question families currently available:

Class-size thresholds and teacher demand
Shrinking a noisy teacher estimate
Teacher sorting on emerging learning needs
Regression to the mean in school ratings
Holding out the cohort used for validation
Teacher-student matching gains
Rewards tied to a narrow test
Tutoring and classroom instruction as complements
Expenditure versus teacher quantity
Teacher rankings depend on the learning objective

Peers, sorting and school assignment: 10 questions

Practice Peers, sorting and school assignment

10 question families currently available:

The reflection problem in classmates’ scores
Random assignment of baseline peer composition
Linear peer spillovers and reshuffling
Nonlinear peer technology and mixing
School quality capitalized into housing
Deferred acceptance with priorities
Priorities and unequal access
Transport and the feasible choice set
Selective exit and average school scores
Friendship choice after random classroom assignment

Education finance, capacity and access: 10 questions

Practice Education finance, capacity and access

10 question families currently available:

A foundation-aid formula
The price of spending under matching aid
Crowd-out of local school spending
A subsidy with fixed college capacity
Fixed costs and marginal enrollment costs
Grant spending per induced enrollee
Income-contingent repayment as insurance
Repayment rules and effort incentives
Application assistance without a tuition change
Rationing when tuition is held below clearing

Education policy design and evaluation: 10 questions

Practice Education policy design and evaluation

10 question families currently available:

Cost per additional graduate
A school lottery and the displaced alternative
A class-size rule that also adds an aide
Designing a study of total tutoring spillovers
A changing test-score denominator
Attendance changes the tested population
Searching across many achievement outcomes
Test-score fadeout and later outcomes
A scholarship that reallocates scarce seats
Allocating a fixed tutoring budget

Economic Growth: 60 questions

Practice Economic Growth

Advanced undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate microeconomics and macroeconomics
Calculus, logarithms, probability and introductory regression
Elementary differential equations; optimization and econometrics for graduate extensions

Growth accounting and measurement: 10 questions

Practice Growth accounting and measurement

10 question families currently available:

Separating capital deepening from efficiency
Hours versus workers
Income gaps and capital intensity
Capital-output normalization
A geometric growth rate
Using capital services
Quality-adjusted labor
Output prices and real growth
A common efficiency measurement error
GDP growth and welfare

Convergence and transitional dynamics: 10 questions

Practice Convergence and transitional dynamics

10 question families currently available:

Convergence halfway to a target
A finite-horizon convergence coefficient
Different long-run targets
Convergence without narrowing dispersion
Saving and the long-run income level
Growth during transition and after it
A destruction shock and the marginal product
A local speed predicted by Solow
No catch-up with a moving frontier gap
A policy level effect observed as growth

Human capital and productive spillovers: 10 questions

Practice Human capital and productive spillovers

10 question families currently available:

Schooling embodied in effective labor
Education time and human-capital growth
A higher skill share in production
Private and aggregate capital elasticities
Capital accumulation with learning spillovers
A knowledge spillover and a subsidy
A growth-accounting schooling coefficient
Human capital helps technology adoption
Skills are not the same as credentials
Spillovers versus worker sorting

Endogenous innovation, varieties and quality ladders: 10 questions

Practice Endogenous innovation, varieties and quality ladders

10 question families currently available:

Nonrival knowledge and replication
Variety with fixed total intermediate input
Quality steps and expected log growth
A patent exposed to displacement
Research entry at a given patent value
Semi-endogenous balanced growth
Research share in a semi-endogenous model
Research productivity inferred from an identity
Creative destruction and business stealing
The opposing innovation wedges

Technology, distribution and misallocation: 10 questions

Practice Technology, distribution and misallocation

10 question families currently available:

Skill supply in a CES production model
Demand shifts inferred from a rising skill premium
Automation and newly created tasks
A two-firm allocation gain
A capital wedge in the allocation condition
Revenue productivity is not physical productivity
Allocation of talent across occupations
Selection after exit
A directed innovation incentive
One distortion versus many

Institutions and empirical growth: 10 questions

Practice Institutions and empirical growth

10 question families currently available:

Proximate accounting and fundamental causes
Expropriation risk and a project threshold
Political resistance to an efficient technology
Complementary institutional reforms
Initial-income error and apparent catch-up
Controlling away an institutional channel
Lagged income in a short panel
A common global trend and year effects
Diffusion while the frontier advances
What a residual-based policy ranking misses

Information and Contract Theory: 60 questions

Practice Information and Contract Theory

Advanced undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate microeconomics and basic game theory
Expected utility, probability and algebra
For graduate extensions: calculus, constrained optimization and conditional expectation

Adverse selection and screening: 10 questions

Practice Adverse selection and screening

10 question families currently available:

Private type at contracting
Participation for a known type
Menu incentive compatibility
Information rent
Monotone quantity necessity
Information rent and low allocation
Efficient high-type quantity
Low-type exclusion boundary
Envelope rent gradient
Single crossing and its limits

Moral hazard and hidden action: 10 questions

Practice Moral hazard and hidden action

10 question families currently available:

Hidden action timing
Binary-effort incentive spread
Participation under effort
Limited-liability implementation cost
Unrestricted transfers benchmark
Profit from implemented effort
Salary alone
Monitoring changes feasible contracts
Uninformative performance measure
First-order approach caveat

Risk sharing and performance incentives: 10 questions

Practice Risk sharing and performance incentives

10 question families currently available:

Insurance with contractible effort
Certain equivalent
Risk premium
Linear incentives and effort
Optimal linear incentive slope
Noise and incentives
Common-shock filtering
Multitask effort substitution
Team residual shares
Incentives versus total surplus

Multidimensional and private information: 10 questions

Practice Multidimensional and private information

10 question families currently available:

Two-dimensional private values
Multidimensional menu choice
Checking all report deviations
Bayesian versus dominant IC
Direct revelation scope
Pairwise allocation test
Information value before contracting
Verification changes report incentives
Correlated private information
Global versus local IC

Incomplete contracts and property rights: 10 questions

Practice Incomplete contracts and property rights

10 question families currently available:

Observable but not verifiable
Residual control rights
Hold-up investment
Efficient relationship investment
Disagreement payoff and bargaining
Ownership and marginal incentives
Integration is a tradeoff
Sunk transfer versus investment incentive
Efficient renegotiation does not ensure efficient investment
Exclusion rights and outside use

Dynamic and relational contracts: 10 questions

Practice Dynamic and relational contracts

10 question families currently available:

Self-enforcing bonus promise
Employer bonus enforcement
Worker’s dynamic effort incentive
Two-sided relational constraints
Known final period
Survival-adjusted continuation
Ratchet effect
Promised continuation utility
Deferred rewards as incentives
Renegotiation credibility

Statistics for Economics: 60 questions

Practice Statistics for Economics

Undergraduate foundations

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Algebra, functions and introductory calculus
Basic economic reasoning

Probability, conditioning and Bayes rules: 10 questions

Practice Probability, conditioning and Bayes rules

10 question families currently available:

Updating after an audit flag
Sampling without replacement
Overlapping expenditure categories
Mutual exclusion is not independence
A conditional rate and a population rate
Total probability across market states
At least one independent delay
Conditional independence with a shared state
Likelihood ratios and posterior odds
Normalizing a conditional table

Random variables, moments and transformations: 10 questions

Practice Random variables, moments and transformations

10 question families currently available:

Expected net cash flow
Variance and its units
Risk of a combined payoff
Scaling a random quantity
A nonlinear average
Iterated expectations for spending
Within-group and between-group variability
Expected count without independence
A discrete quantile convention
Zero covariance with deterministic dependence

Sampling and probability limits: 10 questions

Practice Sampling and probability limits

10 question families currently available:

Sampling variability of an average
Finite-population correction
What the classical central limit theorem normalizes
Concentration is not a normal approximation
A common shock that averaging cannot remove
A heavy-tailed counterexample
Finite mean but infinite variance
Population shares versus sample shares
Sampling trips rather than commuters
Sampling error of an empirical distribution

Estimation and likelihood: 10 questions

Practice Estimation and likelihood

10 question families currently available:

Bias and mean squared error
A boundary maximum for a Bernoulli model
Estimating an exponential arrival rate
Support-dependent likelihood
A method-of-moments variance estimate
Sufficiency for a common success probability
Likelihood is not a posterior probability
Delta-method uncertainty for a logarithm
Likelihood curvature and sample information
A constrained normal-mean estimate

Testing, intervals and statistical power: 10 questions

Practice Testing, intervals and statistical power

10 question families currently available:

An exact binomial tail
Discrete tests can be conservative
Simultaneous coverage from marginal guarantees
When a Student t pivot is exact
Power at a specified alternative
Sample size for a narrower margin
Evidence of practical equivalence
Confidence sets by test inversion
Repeated looks with a fixed-sample threshold
Paired measurements and a difference standard error

Statistical decisions, resampling and design: 10 questions

Practice Statistical decisions, resampling and design

10 question families currently available:

Why bootstrap resampling uses replacement
The conditional center of a bootstrap mean
Distinct observations in a bootstrap replicate
Resampling dependent household records
A decision with asymmetric forecast costs
Estimation actions depend on loss
Allocating a stratified sample
Measurement quality versus sample size
More bootstrap replicates are not more data
Exchangeability in a permutation test

Advanced Econometrics: 60 questions

Practice Advanced Econometrics

Graduate core

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Introductory econometrics and graduate probability and statistics
Matrix algebra, multivariable calculus and optimization
Conditional expectation, stochastic processes and asymptotic notation

Asymptotic theory and extremum estimation: 10 questions

Practice Asymptotic theory and extremum estimation

10 question families currently available:

Pointwise convergence is not enough
A scalar sandwich variance
A nonlinear transformation away from zero
A transformation with zero derivative
Boundary-constrained estimation
Rare events and the triangular-array CLT
Sampling variance versus asymptotic variance
Dependence between two estimated quantities
A population criterion with two optima
A one-step correction

GMM and identification: 10 questions

Practice GMM and identification

10 question families currently available:

Counting moments does not establish rank
Efficiently combining noisy measurements
The efficient scalar GMM variance
Exactly identified weighting
Overidentification degrees of freedom
A nonrejected J test
Rescaling a moment
Conditional moments imply instruments
Flat derivatives and nonstandard rates
Misspecified GMM and weighting

Likelihood and limited dependent variables: 10 questions

Practice Likelihood and limited dependent variables

10 question families currently available:

Logit slope and probability sensitivity
A binary regressor in a nonlinear model
Scale normalization in binary choice
A censored zero in a normal model
Truncation changes the observed density
Tobit effects on the observed mean
Poisson quasi-likelihood without equidispersion
Complete separation in logit
The information equality under misspecification
A regular likelihood-ratio statistic

Panel models and dynamic moments: 10 questions

Practice Panel models and dynamic moments

10 question families currently available:

Feedback and strict exogeneity
A valid lag for differenced dynamics
First-order correlation after differencing
An extra assumption behind system moments
Incidental intercepts in nonlinear panels
Conditional fixed-effects logit
Correlated random effects as a restriction
Random-effects quasi-demeaning
Within slopes under heterogeneous responses
Many instruments and overfitting

Time-series estimation and forecasting: 10 questions

Practice Time-series estimation and forecasting

10 question families currently available:

Stationary AR variance
Moving-average invertibility
Long-run variance of an average
Random-walk forecast uncertainty
A unit-root regression statistic
A stationary combination of integrated series
An error-correction coefficient
Reduced-form shocks and structural interpretation
Forecasting with asymmetric absolute loss
A scalar state update

Nonparametric and semiparametric methods: 10 questions

Practice Nonparametric and semiparametric methods

10 question families currently available:

Balancing kernel bias and variance
Dimension and nonparametric rates
Local linear reproduction at a boundary
Quantile precision depends on local density
Partialling out a nonlinear nuisance
A second-order nuisance remainder
Prediction-optimal smoothing and inference
An ordinary bootstrap at a support endpoint
Series dimension and approximation
Regularization and a coefficient test

Market Design: 60 questions

Practice Market Design

Advanced undergraduate and graduate bridge

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate microeconomics and game theory
Probability and expected utility
Finite graphs and algorithm tracing
Graduate extensions: mechanism design and incentive compatibility

Matching and stability: 10 questions

Practice Matching and stability

10 question families currently available:

Blocking pair
Individual rationality
Vacancy blocking
Counting stable matchings
Worker-proposing deferred acceptance
Firm-proposing deferred acceptance
Proposer optimality scope
Stability is ordinal
Finite proposal bound
Coupled preferences

School choice and trading cycles: 10 questions

Practice School choice and trading cycles

10 question families currently available:

School DA rejection chain
Priorities versus preferences
Justified envy
Truthfulness domain of student DA
Constrained application lists
Immediate acceptance versus DA
Housing top trading cycle
TTC individual rationality
Lottery tie-breaking
Reserves versus hard quotas

Auctions, allocations and payments: 10 questions

Practice Auctions, allocations and payments

10 question families currently available:

Efficient package allocation
VCG externality payment
VCG payment for the other winner
Unit-demand multiunit allocation
Exposure risk
Uniform-price demand reduction
Budget feasibility
Procurement winner and payment
Efficient trade and budget balance
Allocation and payment rules

Matching with contracts and incentives: 10 questions

Practice Matching with contracts and incentives

10 question families currently available:

A contract includes terms
Unit-demand contract feasibility
Responsive institutional choice
Substitutability test
Complementary staffing contracts
Blocking employment contract
Choice consistency after removing rejected offers
Rural-hospitals conclusion scope
Capacity manipulation is a separate issue
Regional cap feasibility

Kidney exchange and operational feasibility: 10 questions

Practice Kidney exchange and operational feasibility

10 question families currently available:

Exchange graph meaning
Directed three-cycle
Cycle-length constraint
Disjoint-cycle optimization
Weighted objective tradeoff
Altruist-started chain
Overlapping plans
Expected completed transplants
Operational capacity
Pool participation incentives

Market implementation, congestion and evidence: 10 questions

Practice Market implementation, congestion and evidence

10 question families currently available:

Thickness and congestion
Processing capacity
Early contracting and information
Exploding offer
Batch matching tradeoff
Randomized mechanism comparison
Before-and-after adoption evidence
Priority compliance audit
Prediction contract payoff
Distributional evaluation

Law and Economics: 60 questions

Practice Law and Economics

Undergraduate with advanced extensions

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Introductory microeconomics and welfare accounting
Probability, expected value and algebra
Empirical extensions: introductory econometrics and potential outcomes

Property rights and bargaining: 10 questions

Practice Property rights and bargaining

10 question families currently available:

Efficient resource use
Bargaining under an injunction
Rights and distribution
Transaction costs block a bargain
Property versus liability protection
Assembly holdout
Exclusion cost
Common-pool congestion
Compensation and real cost
Nonconsenting outsiders

Accidents, torts and precaution: 10 questions

Practice Accidents, torts and precaution

10 question families currently available:

Efficient precaution
Strict liability and care
Negligence threshold
Judgment-proof incentives
Activity level under negligence
Bilateral precaution accounting
Insurance and prevention
Expected damages with incomplete detection
Safety standard error
Care choice under uncertain standards

Contracts, remedies and reliance: 10 questions

Practice Contracts, remedies and reliance

10 question families currently available:

Expectation damages
Efficient breach comparison
Excess stipulated damages
Cover and compensation
Reliance expenditure
Contracting over unverifiable quality
Efficient risk bearer
Renegotiation surplus
Default-rule function
Renegotiation and commitment

Litigation and enforcement: 10 questions

Practice Litigation and enforcement

10 question families currently available:

Plaintiff trial value
Settlement interval
Disagreement about winning
Loser-pays trial value
Private incentive to sue
Social value of enforcement
Court-error tradeoff
Selection of tried cases
Delay and discounting
Enforcement capacity constraint

Crime, sanctions and public costs: 10 questions

Practice Crime, sanctions and public costs

10 question families currently available:

Expected monetary sanction
Deterrence probability threshold
Fine collection limit
Certainty and severity benchmark
Fine revenue versus resources
Marginal deterrence
False punishment and incentives
Incapacitation versus deterrence
Net benefit of custodial enforcement
Displacement of offending

Institutions, innovation and empirical identification: 10 questions

Practice Institutions, innovation and empirical identification

10 question families currently available:

Formal rules and actual enforcement
Institutional correlation
Court reform difference-in-differences
Instrument exclusion in institutions research
Threshold enforcement evaluation
Reported incidents as measurement
Innovation incentive and exclusion
Innovation-policy accounting
Transporting a legal intervention
Efficiency and distribution in reform

Economic History: 60 questions

Practice Economic History

Undergraduate with advanced extensions

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics
Algebra, ratios, percentages and elementary statistics

Agrarian constraints and preindustrial livelihoods: 10 questions

Practice Agrarian constraints and preindustrial livelihoods

10 question families currently available:

Land scarcity in an agrarian model
Population adjustment after a productivity gain
A mortality shock and survivors’ wages
Gross harvest versus grain available to consume
A wage quotation and annual work availability
Transport costs and grain-price gaps
Storage losses and a seasonal price premium
Fuel production and the land constraint
Fragmented fields and a risk tradeoff
Labor obligations valued at their opportunity cost

Industrialization, transport and organization: 10 questions

Practice Industrialization, transport and organization

10 question families currently available:

Relative factor prices and mechanization
Cheap fuel does not guarantee profitable steam adoption
Railway social saving under a fixed-quantity comparison
Market size and factory break-even
Invention and diffusion are different dates
Rail-gauge compatibility and route value
A bottleneck in mechanized production
Limited liability and investor exposure
Patent counts and the observation process
Organizing production inside a factory

Institutions, empire and coercive systems: 10 questions

Practice Institutions, empire and coercive systems

10 question families currently available:

Revenue extraction and resident welfare
A transport network designed for exports
Persistence across a historical boundary
Selecting where institutions were imposed
Slaveholders’ asset values and social accounting
Emancipation and the interpretation of output
Guild rules with two possible functions
Fiscal capacity and collection efficiency
A land register and excluded customary users
Testing an institutional persistence mechanism

Labor, migration and demographic evidence: 10 questions

Practice Labor, migration and demographic evidence

10 question families currently available:

Reconstructing population from flows
Crude death rates and age composition
Life expectancy at birth and adult survival
Birth counts and the population at risk
Surviving children and desired births
Women’s work and census classification
Selective return migration in linked records
Birth cohorts versus period averages
A passage contract and constrained migration
A child-labor rule and household responses

Money, banking and financial disruption: 10 questions

Practice Money, banking and financial disruption

10 question families currently available:

Metallic parity between two currencies
Bimetallic payment incentives
Reserve cover and an external drain
Banknote discounts and redemption costs
Debt deflation in a fixed contract
Low nominal rates during expected deflation
Branching and exposure to local shocks
Clearinghouse certificates and public cash demand
A banking suspension and competing channels
Gross note issuance versus the currency stock

Historical sources, measurement and inference: 10 questions

Practice Historical sources, measurement and inference

10 question families currently available:

Surviving business ledgers
Military height records and an enlistment threshold
Age heaping as a reporting diagnostic
A fixed historical basket and changing prices
City growth after annexation
Annual dates inferred from decennial records
A historical instrument with a persistent direct channel
A supposed effect before exposure
Two independent source series disagree
Positive explanation and normative endorsement

Empirical Macroeconomics: 60 questions

Practice Empirical Macroeconomics

Advanced undergraduate and graduate

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Intermediate macroeconomics and econometrics
Linear algebra, probability and time-series methods

Macroeconomic data and real-time information: 10 questions

Practice Macroeconomic data and real-time information

10 question families currently available:

Reconstructing a historical information set
A forecast error changes with the evaluation vintage
Quarterly annualization
Converting a quarterly spending flow
Release revisions as news
Release revisions as noise removal
An unbalanced monthly information set
Chain-weighted component levels
Seasonal adjustment and future information
A denominator revision in a debt ratio

Structural shock identification: 10 questions

Practice Structural shock identification

10 question families currently available:

Policy actions and policy innovations
A recursive within-quarter restriction
Sign restrictions and a response range
Normalizing a proxy-identified impact
Announcement surprises with information content
Fiscal news before implementation
A long-run neutrality restriction
Heteroskedasticity without distinct variance shifts
A weak macro shock proxy
News shocks outside the observed information set

VARs and local-projection responses: 10 questions

Practice VARs and local-projection responses

10 question families currently available:

Propagating an identified VAR impact
A shock share of forecast-error variance
From growth responses to a level response
A local-projection coefficient as an impulse response
Overlapping forecast horizons
LP and VAR identification
Lag length and estimated precision
Defining the state before the shock
Pointwise bands versus a response path
Resampling an identified response

Forecast construction and evaluation: 10 questions

Practice Forecast construction and evaluation

10 question families currently available:

Recursive forecast evaluation
Rolling versus expanding windows
Combining forecasts with imperfectly correlated errors
A variance-minimizing forecast weight
Forecast-comparison dependence
Predictive density versus point prediction
A probability calibration check
Conditional scenarios and unconditional forecasts
Forecast encompassing
Error attribution from a forecasting failure

Latent states, filtering and nowcasting: 10 questions

Practice Latent states, filtering and nowcasting

10 question families currently available:

Filtering and smoothing an output gap
A noisier indicator and its signal weight
Trend-cycle decomposition needs restrictions
Noise identified from differenced covariances
Uncertainty after an informative measurement
Prediction variance between releases
News from a release changes a nowcast
A common factor’s arbitrary scale
A monthly-flow measurement equation
An output gap at the sample endpoint

Policy evidence and historical interpretation: 10 questions

Practice Policy evidence and historical interpretation

10 question families currently available:

A cumulative fiscal multiplier
Converting percent responses to a dollar multiplier
Regional spending effects and national policy
Narrative tax classification
Separating bank credit supply from borrower demand
From an estimated shock response to a new policy rule
A banking panic and output timing
Inflation persistence and persistent shocks
A historical shock decomposition
Selecting an impressive response horizon

Principles of Microeconomics: 60 questions

Practice Principles of Microeconomics

Undergraduate introduction

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Arithmetic, percentages and basic algebra
Reading tables and comparing alternatives
No calculus or prior economics required

Scarcity, decisions and trade: 10 questions

Practice Scarcity, decisions and trade

10 question families currently available:

Choosing among exclusive projects
Comparing a bundle of projects
Opportunity cost from a production table
Marginal tradeoff changes
Comparative advantage in tasks
Testing proposed terms of trade
Past spending and an exit option
Incremental capacity decision
Positive claim and value judgment
Using a simplified model

Demand, supply and market adjustment: 10 questions

Practice Demand, supply and market adjustment

10 question families currently available:

Market clearing from a schedule
Shortage is excess desired purchases
Excess supply and inventories
A demand shift in data
Simultaneous market shifts
Revenue from a price experiment
Responsiveness from two schedules
Tax remittance and economic burden
Seller subsidy wedge
Identifying a demand curve

Household choice, work and uncertainty: 10 questions

Practice Household choice, work and uncertainty

10 question families currently available:

An affordable consumption bundle
Choosing with a utility table
Marginal benefit from total benefit
Cash and a restricted voucher
Take-home gain from working
A nonmonetary job attribute
Consumption across two dates
A choice under uncertainty
Deductible and expected reimbursement
Default option and behavior

Production, costs and firm decisions: 10 questions

Practice Production, costs and firm decisions

10 question families currently available:

Profit from a cost schedule
Whether to operate today
Incremental production cost
Accounting and economic profit
Productivity from worker counts
Hiring with product revenue
Selecting a production technique
Input substitution after a price change
Scale and average cost
Entry and economic profit

Market power, strategy and information: 10 questions

Practice Market power, strategy and information

10 question families currently available:

Pricing with a demand table
Revenue from an extra unit with uniform pricing
Price discrimination and selection
Best response from a payoff table
Dominant action and joint profit
Strategic interdependence
Quality hidden before sale
Incentives after a guarantee
Information and credible verification
Market share is not a full diagnosis

Surplus, public policy and evidence: 10 questions

Practice Surplus, public policy and evidence

10 question families currently available:

Gains from discrete trades
Dividing surplus at a price
A tax can eliminate gains from trade
External harm in a transaction
Benefits of a shared project
Congestion changes rivalry
Trade at a world price
A tariff’s observed revenue
Distribution and compensation
Evidence on a subsidy

Principles of Macroeconomics: 60 questions

Practice Principles of Macroeconomics

Undergraduate introduction

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Arithmetic, percentages and basic algebra
No calculus or prior economics required

Production, jobs and national accounts: 10 questions

Practice Production, jobs and national accounts

10 question families currently available:

Following value through a supply chain
An imported component in a domestic product
Construction versus a change of ownership
Production at a foreign-owned factory
Purchasing shares is not building a factory
Jobs increase while unemployment also rises
Shorter hours with the same employment count
A transition between jobs
Real GDP per person and the typical household
Stocks and flows in a city report

Prices, inflation and purchasing power: 10 questions

Practice Prices, inflation and purchasing power

10 question families currently available:

Two households face different price pressures
Slower inflation is not lower prices
A pay raise and purchasing power
One price rises faster than the rest
An indexed benefit with a different personal basket
A fixed cash budget buys fewer baskets
Deflation and the value of cash
Sales revenue grows without more production
Price indexes with different reference years
A better product and measured inflation

Growth and productive capacity: 10 questions

Practice Growth and productive capacity

10 question families currently available:

A larger economy with less output per person
Replacing worn-out equipment
Equipment without the missing skills
Long-run compounding changes a comparison
More output from a better schedule
Building capacity uses resources today
Saving is useful only with productive allocation
An idea that several producers can use
Predictable rules and a long-lived project
A temporary boom is not proof of faster trend growth

Spending, business cycles and fiscal choices: 10 questions

Practice Spending, business cycles and fiscal choices

10 question families currently available:

Unexpected shelves of unsold goods
Everyone tries to save more during a slump
Investment responds to expected customers
Three rounds of a spending expansion
The first round of a transfer versus a purchase
Two shocks pull output in opposite directions
A family uses savings after a temporary income loss
A stimulus project arrives after conditions change
A budget surplus does not reveal the policy change
A closure in one industry and the whole economy

Banking, money and monetary policy: 10 questions

Practice Banking, money and monetary policy

10 question families currently available:

A loan creates two balance-sheet entries
A payment between two banks
Loan losses and the equity cushion
A liquid asset shortage is not the same as insolvency
Repaying a bank loan with a deposit
Policy rates and customer borrowing rates
Fixed versus adjustable mortgage payments
More reserves do not force more lending
A price target and an inflation-rate target
Stabilization after an energy disruption

International spending and exchange rates: 10 questions

Practice International spending and exchange rates

10 question families currently available:

Travel becomes more expensive in home currency
An exporter’s margin depends on the invoice currency
Why imports are subtracted in GDP accounting
A trade deficit is not a government deficit
Foreign finance and a domestic construction project
A foreign downturn reaches domestic producers
An import leakage in a spending round
A weaker currency and higher domestic prices
A promised fixed exchange rate faces selling pressure
Can every country run a trade surplus?

History of Economic Thought: 60 questions

Practice History of Economic Thought

Undergraduate with advanced extensions

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics; algebra and elementary calculus

Classical political economy, value and distribution: 10 questions

Practice Classical political economy, value and distribution

10 question families currently available:

Smith’s division of labor as a mechanism
The extent of the market and specialization
Natural price is not an ethical label
A market-price deviation and entry
Ricardo’s distributional question
Differential rent on two grades of land
Rent as a differential rather than a uniform cost
Relative costs in a trade illustration
A mutually beneficial barter ratio
Ricardo’s machinery qualification

Marginal analysis and changing concepts of value: 10 questions

Practice Marginal analysis and changing concepts of value

10 question families currently available:

Total usefulness and the final increment
Diminishing marginal utility without falling total utility
Past labor and current exchange value
Equal marginal benefit per unit of expenditure
Ordinal representation and measurable intensity
A boundary choice and the limits of an equality rule
Marshall’s other-things-equal method
Time periods defined by adjustment possibilities
Demand and supply as joint conditions
Different theories can ask different questions

Marxian categories and institutional explanations: 10 questions

Practice Marxian categories and institutional explanations

10 question families currently available:

Labor-power and the labor performed
Necessary and surplus labor time
The surplus-value rate is not the profit rate
Socially necessary time versus individual slowness
Equivalent exchange and the source of surplus
A conditional effect of capital composition
Veblen’s conspicuous consumption
Status competition and aggregate expenditure
Institutions as part of preference formation
Legal rules and the set of feasible bargains

Keynesian arguments and competing closures: 10 questions

Practice Keynesian arguments and competing closures

10 question families currently available:

Effective demand and employment
Saving-investment identity versus coordination
A thrift experiment in a demand-led model
Expected capital returns and investment
Liquidity preference as a portfolio question
An illustrative liquidity-preference schedule
Confidence and a conditional investment calculation
A wage cut at the firm and economy levels
A textbook interpretation and its limits
Why the thrift result is conditional

Equilibrium, welfare and formal reconstruction: 10 questions

Practice Equilibrium, welfare and formal reconstruction

10 question families currently available:

Existence is not a theory of adjustment
A numeraire and relative prices
A market implication of the value budget identity
Pareto improvement and a distributional tradeoff
Potential compensation is not actual compensation
Utility scales and interpersonal sums
Social weights as an explicit judgment
A welfare theorem and an omitted external effect
Nonconvex production and marginal-cost pricing
Reconstruction versus textual attribution

Knowledge, expectations and methodological disputes: 10 questions

Practice Knowledge, expectations and methodological disputes

10 question families currently available:

Hayek’s dispersed knowledge problem
A price signal without the full story
Friedman’s proposed test of a hypothesis
Unrealistic assumptions and a criticism’s target
Rational expectations do not mean perfect foresight
A policy rule changes an observed coefficient
An accounting equation and a monetary theory
Aggregation and a representative response
Calibration targets and independent evidence
Predictive agreement and welfare disagreement

Mathematical Economics: 60 questions

Practice Mathematical Economics

Undergraduate and graduate foundations

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Single-variable calculus and algebra
Basic economic optimization and expected value
For advanced units: sets, limits and elementary probability

Linear algebra and equilibrium systems: 10 questions

Practice Linear algebra and equilibrium systems

10 question families currently available:

Solving an allocation system
Redundant accounting equations
Inconsistent accounting equations
Eigenvalues of a transition matrix
Linear comparative statics
Gross output and intermediate requirements
Positive definite curvature
Semidefinite versus definite
Projection onto a common component
Affine feasible-set dimension

Multivariate calculus and comparative statics: 10 questions

Practice Multivariate calculus and comparative statics

10 question families currently available:

A gradient with interacting inputs
Total change along a path
Implicit tradeoff slope
Implicit demand response
Hessian test for a quadratic
Stationarity without optimality
Second-order Taylor approximation
Logarithmic sensitivity
Euler identity for homogeneous output
Envelope derivative

Constrained optimization and KKT conditions: 10 questions

Practice Constrained optimization and KKT conditions

10 question families currently available:

Equality-constrained product maximization
Multiplier sign convention
Logarithmic allocation and shadow value
Binding upper constraint
Slack constraint and zero multiplier
Complementary slackness interpretation
A boundary maximum without a zero derivative
Constraint qualification failure
Linear objective on a ball
Multiple boundary optima

Convexity, duality and existence: 10 questions

Practice Convexity, duality and existence

10 question families currently available:

A convex production requirement
A disconnected feasible set
Strict concavity and existence
Existence on a compact set
Supremum versus maximum
Strict Jensen inequality
Expenditure with perfect substitutes
Convex conjugate
Primal-dual optimality certificate
Continuous value with a kink

Difference and differential equations: 10 questions

Practice Difference and differential equations

10 question families currently available:

Steady state of an affine recursion
Closed-form adjustment path
Damped oscillations
Unstable discrete equilibrium
Unit coefficient with drift
Second-order difference dynamics
Continuous adjustment solution
Nonlinear local stability
Stable path in a saddle system
Euler discretization stability

Fixed points and dynamic optimization: 10 questions

Practice Fixed points and dynamic optimization

10 question families currently available:

Brouwer’s existence guarantee
Contraction and its fixed point
Existence without convergence
Kakutani hypothesis check
A Bellman action comparison
Bellman contraction error bound
Two-period consumption allocation
Terminal condition in a finite problem
Choosing a sufficient state
Discounting does not ensure a vanishing terminal term

Computational Economics: 60 questions

Practice Computational Economics

Advanced undergraduate and graduate

60 distinct question families. Numerical or contextual variants within a family practice the same underlying task.

Recommended preparation:

Calculus, linear algebra, probability and constrained optimization
Basic programming

Numerical roots and constrained optimization: 10 questions

Practice Numerical roots and constrained optimization

10 question families currently available:

Bracketing a market-clearing price
A Newton price update
When a bracket certifies existence
Budget-feasible projected steps
A stationary point that is not a maximum
Backtracking an overshooting step
A misleading residual scale
A flat equation near its root
A constrained profit maximum
Multiple starting values

Quadrature and simulation: 10 questions

Practice Quadrature and simulation

10 question families currently available:

A trapezoidal expected payoff
A midpoint expected payoff
Quadrature with probability weights
Monte Carlo precision
Paired policy simulations
Antithetic draws for a linear payoff
Importance sampling support
An autocorrelated simulation mean
A control variate with known mean
Simulation noise inside optimization

Dynamic programming and policy evaluation: 10 questions

Practice Dynamic programming and policy evaluation

10 question families currently available:

A Bellman improvement step
A Bellman residual certificate
Evaluating a fixed policy
Finite-horizon terminal conditions
Nested action grids
Infeasible consumption in a grid search
Nearly tied actions
A stochastic continuation value
In-place and simultaneous updates
A supplied feasible policy

Equilibrium algorithms: 10 questions

Practice Equilibrium algorithms

10 question families currently available:

A damped price adjustment
An oscillating market algorithm
Solving a two-equation equilibrium
A stationary distribution
Price normalization in homogeneous markets
A complementarity condition
Inner-solver error in aggregate equilibrium
Continuation across parameter values
A game best-response trace
Checking all markets

Approximation and interpolation: 10 questions

Practice Approximation and interpolation

10 question families currently available:

Interpolating a savings policy
Interpolation versus extrapolation
A local Taylor approximation
Error scaling under grid refinement
A tensor grid’s size
A borrowing constraint creates a kink
On-node fit and off-node accuracy
Linear interpolation preserves interval bounds
Testing an approximated equilibrium policy
A two-state expectation interpolated incorrectly

Error, stability and reproducibility: 10 questions

Practice Error, stability and reproducibility

10 question families currently available:

Cancellation in a small difference
Absolute and relative error
A central finite difference
Making a derivative step too small
A residual is not a forward-error guarantee
A timestep stability restriction
A deterministic seed is not full provenance
Separating error sources
A validation identity for a transition matrix
An analytic benchmark test

Choose a practice session

Expanded curriculum in development

The course outlines below guide new question writing. They do not mean that every listed topic already has active questions. Undergraduate and graduate requirements differ; advanced extensions will be labeled separately.

This map draws on official university course materials and combines overlapping topics into general course titles. It is not an exhaustive census of every university or theory. Course-specific sources appear where available; field outlines also draw on the Yale economics catalog and Stanford course list.

Microeconomic theory

Principles of Microeconomics

Introductory undergraduate

Supply/demand
preferences, utility, budget choice
income/substitution effects
production/costs
competition and surplus
welfare
monopoly/oligopoly
labor/capital markets
intertemporal choice
trade policy
uncertainty and insurance
redistribution/taxation
externalities
behavioral and health applications

Introductory undergraduate. Calculus intensity varies by institution; do not equate all principles courses with AP.

Curriculum evidence: MIT 14.01 calendar, fall 2023

Intermediate Microeconomics

Intermediate undergraduate

Consumer and producer optimization
partial and general equilibrium
insurance
welfare theorems and market failure
contracts/mechanisms
theory tested against data and policy counterfactuals. More detailed syllabus: preferences, MRS, Lagrangians, demand homogeneity, income/substitution effects, Engel curves, Giffen goods

MIT 14.04 assumes introductory micro and multivariable calculus; linear algebra, statistics, econometrics, and computing help. Some advanced applications in this offering should be optional extensions, not universal intermediate requirements.

Curriculum evidence: MIT 14.04 syllabus, fall 2022

Intermediate Microeconomics / Mathematical Track

Intermediate undergraduate; mathematical track

Consumer/producer theory
competitive equilibrium
monopoly
general equilibrium
games
asymmetric information

Berkeley 101A covers similar topics to 100A with more calculus. This supports a mathematical-depth setting inside the general course, rather than duplicated institution-specific courses.

Curriculum evidence: Berkeley 101A, fall 2026

Advanced Microeconomics: Choice and Demand

Graduate core

Choice/preference/utility foundations
properties and representation
consumer demand
classical demand theory
revealed preference
uncertainty
social choice if time permits

Berkeley first-year PhD core assumes advanced undergraduate micro and ECON 204 or equivalent. Emphasizes theorems/proofs and applying tools to new problems. Its own syllabus explicitly disclaims exhaustive coverage.

Curriculum evidence: Berkeley 201A choice theory, fall 2025

Advanced Microeconomics: Individual and Firm Decisions

Graduate core; intermediate micro, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and basic real analysis

Preference and utility
consumer theory and applications
producer theory and monotone methods
choice under uncertainty
dynamic choice

Graduate core; intermediate micro, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and basic real analysis. Add formal reasoning, counterexamples, and assumption diagnosis rather than only numerical substitutions.

Curriculum evidence: MIT 14.121 readings, fall 2015; prerequisites

Game Theory

Graduate core edition

Strategic forms
Nash/mixed equilibrium and existence
extensive forms
subgame perfection
repeated games
types/Bayesian equilibrium
signaling, reputation, perfect Bayesian equilibrium, refinements

Graduate core edition. Offer an undergraduate numerical/graphical entry path separately from proof-oriented extensions.

Curriculum evidence: MIT 14.122 calendar, fall 2002

Decision Theory and Behavioral Economics

Graduate edition requires consumer optimization and game theory

Expected utility under risk
risk aversion
stochastic dominance
subjective expected utility
critiques of expected utility
prospect theory
rational inattention
flexibility, temptation, self-control
hyperbolic discounting and bargaining/investment applications

Graduate edition requires consumer optimization and game theory. Introductory behavioral examples can share concept tags without sharing a difficulty scale.

Curriculum evidence: MIT 14.123 syllabus, spring 2015

Information, Contracts, and Mechanism Design

Graduate core/field progression; calculus, probability, constrained optimization and game theory recommended

Statistical decision theory
moral hazard/adverse selection
incentive and incomplete contracts
agency
information design and costly information acquisition

Graduate core/field progression; calculus, probability, constrained optimization and game theory recommended.

Curriculum evidence: MIT economics catalog, 14.124 and contract-theory description, fall 2026

Market Design

Graduate field course follows mechanism design

Auctions
allocation in labor markets and school choice
prediction/financial markets
organ exchange

Graduate field course follows mechanism design. Use case-specific feasibility, incentives and welfare tasks.

Curriculum evidence: MIT economics catalog, 14.125, fall 2026

Advanced Game Theory

Graduate field/research level

Supermodular/global/repeated/signaling games
bargaining, cheap talk, reputation
equilibrium learning
higher-order beliefs/common priors
networks/social learning
stochastic games and evolutionary dynamics

Graduate field/research level. Catalog lists advanced game theory as not offered in 2026–27; retain as curricular evidence, not a claim of current delivery.

Curriculum evidence: MIT economics catalog, 14.126–14.127, fall 2026

Macroeconomic theory

Principles of Macroeconomics

Introductory undergraduate

Measurement
goods and financial markets
IS–LM
labor markets
Phillips curve
aggregate supply/demand
exchange rates and open economies
growth
expectations
interest rates and term structure
stock markets
consumption, investment, fiscal policy

Platform recommendation: arithmetic, percentages, graphs; do not infer a calculus requirement from the topic list.

Curriculum evidence: topics and readings

Intermediate Macroeconomics

Undergraduate

General equilibrium foundations
Solow, golden rule, human capital, convergence and growth accounting
Ramsey/planner versus equilibrium
phase diagrams
endogenous growth, learning, R&D and biased technical change
RBC
New Keynesian fluctuations
permanent income, borrowing constraints and investment Q
stabilization

MIT explicitly requires principles of micro and macro. Columbia explicitly requires principles and Calculus I; recommends Calculus III and intermediate micro. Platform should tag calculus/ODE depth rather than treating all intermediate courses identically.

Curriculum evidence: outline; syllabus; syllabus

Advanced Macroeconomic Theory

Graduate core / advanced undergraduate bridge selected by mathematical readiness

Dynamic growth and business-cycle equilibrium
Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans
Diamond OLG
log-linearization and rational-expectations solution
RBC calibration, factor utilization and model evaluation
nominal rigidities
monetary/fiscal shocks
optimal policy and time consistency

Platform recommendation: intermediate theory, multivariable calculus, optimization, probability, difference equations. The graduate source is not evidence that all these belong in ordinary undergraduate intermediate macro.

Curriculum evidence: syllabus

Economic Growth and Development

Advanced undergraduate conceptual track; separate graduate mathematical track

Solow and empirical growth accounting
neoclassical optimizing growth
dynamic efficiency and OLG
human capital and spillovers
endogenous innovation, expanding varieties and quality ladders
technical change and distribution. Separate proximate accounting from causal institutional explanations

Platform recommendation: intermediate macro; graduate derivations additionally need dynamic optimization and general equilibrium.

Curriculum evidence: syllabus; syllabus

Monetary Economics and Stabilization Policy

Upper undergraduate foundations; separate graduate policy track

Nominal rigidity
liquidity traps
optimal fiscal/monetary policy
government spending
reputation and commitment
public liquidity
borrowing constraints
employment with wage rigidity
information and expectations

MIT advanced offering explicitly requires graduate microeconomic theory and economic growth. Platform: introduce policy rules and transmission before optimal-policy derivations.

Curriculum evidence: syllabus; calendar

International Macroeconomics

Upper undergraduate / MA

Current-account sustainability and intertemporal choice
terms of trade and world interest rate
production and uncertainty
large open economies
fiscal/current-account links
PPP and real exchange rates
capital-market integration and controls
nominal rigidity, currency pegs and balance-of-payments crises

Platform recommendation: intermediate macro, intertemporal budgets, basic optimization. Source explicitly labels its materials BA/MA.

Curriculum evidence: International Macroeconomics teaching materials

Open-Economy Macroeconomic Theory

Graduate core

Stationary versus nonstationary shocks
capital accumulation
open-economy RBC calibration, approximation and stationarity
complete markets
emerging-economy cycles
interest-rate shocks. Terms of trade, nontradables, nominal rigidity, controls, credibility, financial frictions and sovereign default are explicitly time-permitting extensions in this syllabus

First-year PhD sequence; platform recommendation: dynamic stochastic optimization and prior graduate macro.

Curriculum evidence: syllabus

Financial Crises and International Macro Policy

Graduate field

Collateral constraints and overborrowing
pecuniary externalities
sudden stops
macroprudential policy
nominal wage rigidity, currency pegs and unemployment
sovereign default
exchange-rate determination and international cycles

Platform recommendation: graduate macro, open-economy models, numerical methods; scaffold conceptual questions separately.

Curriculum evidence: syllabus

Empirical Macroeconomics and Monetary History

Advanced undergraduate methods / graduate field

VARs
narrative identification and natural experiments
monetary transmission and credit
inflation persistence
fiscal effects
financial panics
Depression and recovery
inflation and stabilization episodes. Distinguish historical interpretation from identification

Berkeley seminar source requires empirical work; platform recommendation: econometrics and intermediate macro.

Curriculum evidence: Monetary History course

Methods and fields

Statistics for Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Conditional probability
Bayes
expectations and variance
sampling
LLN/CLT
confidence intervals
testing
power
multiple testing
Diagnose a sampling frame
interpret uncertainty
construct counterexamples to independence
compare power designs

Advanced extensions: Convergence concepts; delta method; empirical processes

Introductory Econometrics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

OLS interpretation
logs/interactions
omitted variables
heteroskedasticity
robust inference
prediction versus causation
Interpret coefficient tables
identify a bad control
repair units
explain why precision differs across samples

Advanced extensions: Matrix projections; asymptotic distributions; efficiency

Causal Inference and Applied Econometrics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Potential outcomes
random assignment
noncompliance
IV/LATE
DiD
RD
fixed effects
clustering
Choose an estimand
identify failed assumptions
read an event-study figure
distinguish selection from treatment effects

Advanced extensions: Heterogeneous-treatment DiD; weak IV; partial identification; doubly robust estimation; sensitivity analysis

Advanced Econometrics

Graduate core and field extensions

Likelihood
GMM
binary outcomes
panel models
forecasting
stationarity
Select valid moments
diagnose identification failure
compare forecast loss
interpret marginal effects

Advanced extensions: Nonparametrics; bootstrap validity; cointegration; state-space models; dynamic panels; high-dimensional inference

Labor Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Labor supply/demand
human capital
signaling
compensating differentials
discrimination
monopsony
minimum wages
unions
migration
Compare competitive and monopsonistic responses
distinguish signaling from productivity
evaluate wage-gap claims

Advanced extensions: Search/matching; wage posting; sorting; task models; equilibrium policy incidence

Public Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Incidence
excess burden
optimal commodity taxes
public goods
redistribution
social insurance
pensions
local public finance
Separate transfers from resource costs
compare insurance and incentive effects
trace tax wedges across markets

Advanced extensions: Mirrlees taxation; sufficient statistics; dynamic public finance; mechanism design

Industrial Organization

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Cournot/Bertrand/Stackelberg
product differentiation
entry
collusion
discrimination
vertical restraints
regulation
platforms
Diagnose strategic substitutes/complements
evaluate merger counterfactuals
distinguish concentration from market power

Advanced extensions: Discrete-choice demand; structural supply; dynamic entry; auctions; search estimation

Development Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Poverty measurement
traps
credit/insurance failures
agriculture
education/health
migration
technology adoption
institutions
Contrast mechanisms behind low take-up
interpret a randomized intervention
detect spillovers
assess external validity

Advanced extensions: Household bargaining; networks; misallocation; structural transformation; program equilibrium effects

International Trade

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Comparative advantage
specific factors
factor proportions
terms of trade
scale economies
tariffs/quotas
migration
offshoring
Identify winners and losers
compare small/large-country tariffs
interpret gravity estimates
distinguish productivity from selection

Advanced extensions: Gravity; heterogeneous firms; quantitative trade; global value chains; spatial equilibrium

Environmental and Resource Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Externalities
taxes/permits/standards
abatement
valuation
discounting
common resources
renewable/nonrenewable stocks
energy dispatch
Choose instruments given uncertainty
distinguish stock/flow pollutants
compare discounting assumptions
interpret nonmarket valuation

Advanced extensions: Prices versus quantities under uncertainty; dynamic extraction; climate damages; integrated assessment; leakage

Health Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Health demand
insurance
adverse selection
moral hazard
provider incentives
payment
cost-effectiveness
Distinguish selection from utilization responses
interpret incremental cost-effectiveness
compare payment incentives

Advanced extensions: Risk adjustment; selection estimation; provider competition; dynamic health capital

Behavioral and Experimental Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Present bias
loss aversion
reference dependence
probability weighting
social preferences
limited attention
experiment design
Identify competing explanations
evaluate commitment choices
distinguish framing from payoff changes
diagnose experiment confounds

Advanced extensions: Identification of behavioral parameters; welfare with inconsistent preferences; belief elicitation; field/lab transport

Financial Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Discounting
bonds
duration
diversification
mean–variance portfolios
CAPM
arbitrage
options
market efficiency
Find an arbitrage with stated trading constraints
compare risk measures
explain yield/price changes
separate risk premia from expected losses

Advanced extensions: Stochastic discount factors; consumption pricing; term structure; incomplete markets; continuous-time finance

Economic History and History of Thought

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Industrialization
institutions
migration
slavery and coercion
crises
technological change
classical/marginalist/Keynesian traditions
Evaluate a historical source
compare explanations with explicit evidence
distinguish descriptive claims from normative commitments

Advanced extensions: Historical measurement; archival selection; persistence designs; competing institutional mechanisms

Political Economy

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Voting
collective action
rent seeking
commitment
institutions
accountability
conflict
redistribution
Test a median-voter conclusion against assumptions
trace an accountability mechanism
distinguish correlation from institutional causation

Advanced extensions: Probabilistic voting; political agency; endogenous institutions; dynamic conflict

Urban and Spatial Economics

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Location
commuting
housing supply
sorting
agglomeration
local public goods
Read bid-rent diagrams
separate capitalization from welfare
assess displacement and spillovers

Advanced extensions: Quantitative spatial equilibrium; migration frictions; place-based policies

Economics of Education

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Human capital/signaling
returns
school choice
peers
teachers
finance
access
Separate selection from school effects
compare private/social returns
diagnose peer-effect identification

Advanced extensions: Value-added identification; matching; dynamic education choice

Law, Institutions and Innovation

Undergraduate foundations with separately identified advanced extensions

Property rights
contracts
liability
enforcement
patents
R&D incentives
diffusion
Compare liability incentives under stated information
identify a hold-up problem
assess patent tradeoffs without assumed empirical conclusions

Advanced extensions: Incomplete contracts; innovation races; cumulative innovation; data and platform governance