SUBJECT MATTER AND CONTENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL ... - SAIS

SUBJECT MATTER AND CONTENT OF THE
INDIVIDUAL WAIVER EXAMS
Samples of previous waiver exams or practice questions are not made available. So to help you prepare for each
exam, below are the descriptions of the subject matter areas that will be included:
Microeconomics and Macroeconomics
Both the micro and macro economics courses at SAIS are taught at an INTERMEDIATE level (which is the next level
above the "Principles" level. To qualify to take these exams, the student must show that they have successfully taken
intermediate-level courses on their prior academic transcript (there are no exceptions to this).
The Microeconomics waiver exam will include material from the following areas:
Supply and Demand; Utility Functions; Budget Constraints; Derivation of Demand Curves; Substitution and Income
Effect; Consumer and Producer Surplus; Market Demand and Elasticity; Productions and Cost Functions; Perfect
Competition; Monopoly and Oligopoly; Multimarket Equilibrium; Asymmetric Information; Externalities; Public Goods;
Bargaining, Efficiency, and the Coase Theorem; Basic Game Theory.
Some text books to consider for review are:
Intermediate Microeconomics, by Varian, latest edition, Norton
Microeconomics, by Pindyck & Rubinfeld, latest edition, Pearson
Microeconomics, by Katz & Rosen, latest edition, McGraw-Hill
The Macroeconomics waiver exam will include material from the following areas:
National income Accounting; Labor/Goods and Money Markets; Money Supply Process; IS-LM Model; Aggregate
Demand and Supply; Growth Theory; Ricardian Equivalence; Phillips Curve; Theories of Consumption; Government
Debt; Fiscal and Monetary Policy; Ricardian Equivalence; Growth Theory; Open Economy Macroeconomics including
the Mundell-Fleming Model.
Some text books to consider for review are:
Macroeconomics, by Abel & Bernanke, latest edition, Pearson
Macroeconomics, by Blanchard, latest edition, Prentice-Hall
Macroeconomics, by Mankiw, latest edition, Worth;
Macroeconomics, by Hall & Taylor, latest edition, Norton
International Trade/Monetary Theory
To qualify for the waiver exams in International Trade, the student must have previously completed a course
in International Trade Theory. To qualify for the waiver exam in International Monetary Theory, the student must have
previously completed a course in International Monetary Economics, International Finance, or Open-Economy
Macroeconomics. The content of the International Trade and Monetary waiver exams are very much like that of a
cumulative final exam in these two areas.
The International Trade waiver exam will include material from the following areas:
Causes/models of trade, the sources of the gains from trade and the domestic and international distribution of those
gains. The instruments and consequences of trade policy measures, especially tariffs and quantitative restrictions,
preferential trade agreements and the practice of trade policy. Occasional questions may appear on basic issues in: trade
and the environment, trade and migration, trade and employment, strategic trade theory, trade and industrial
policy/protection.
A text book to consider for review purposes is:
International Economics, by Appleyard, Field and Cobb, latest edition, McGraw-Hill.

The International Monetary waiver exam will include material from the following areas:
The basic theory underlying the international monetary system. Topics include international financial markets; the
macroeconomics of open economies; balance-of-payments and trade balances; exchange rates and foreign exchange
markets; expectations, interests rates, capital flows; central banking and monetary policy in open economies; interaction
of economies at the macro level; exchange-rate regimes; various common models of open economies under fixed and
flexible exchange rates.
A text book to consider for review purposes is:
International Economics: Theory and Policy, by Krugman, Paul and Maurice Obstfeld, latest edition, Addison-
Wesley.
Statistics
Statistics is technically not a required course for the economics concentration at SAIS. However, many students at SAIS
need courses that have statistics as a prerequisite. The SAIS statistics course ("Statistical Methods for Business and
Economics") itself emphasizes subjects that are generally considered essential knowledge for the next-level econometrics
courses at SAIS. The coverage of the statistics waiver follows generally (but not exclusively) the content of the SAIS
statistics course. Not all the material of a traditional introductory statistics course taken will be emphasized in the exam
just the specific subject matter areas here described:
The Statistics waiver exam will include material from the following areas:
Basic Probability Theory; Mathematical Expectation and Moments; Calculation of Sample Statistics and Measures of
Central Tendency; Distribution Theory; Hypothesis Testing and Confidence Intervals; Expectation, Variance, Covariance.
The statistics exam excludes: analysis-of-variance, linear regression, decision theory and Bayesian approaches, momentgenerating
functions, and point estimation theory (i.e. unbiasedness, consistency, efficiency, etc.). All or some of these
topics may have been included as part of your basic mathematical statistics or probability theory course, but these will not
be covered in our waiver exam.
SPECIAL REQUIREMENT FOR TAKING THE STATISTICS WAIVER: To field several of the questions you
will need to have a good calculator handy as well as access to a set of STANDARD STATISTICAL TABLES which
shows probability or critical values for common statistical distributions. At the very minimum, these tables should
include t-distribution, chi-square, and F-distributions. (Usually these tables can be found in the back of any statistics
textbook or by performing an on-line search under "statistical tables".) It is suggested that you familiarize yourself with
the use of these tables in advance so that you do not use an inordinate amount of time during the exam interpreting the
numbers.
A good way to review for statistics is to take a Schaum's Outline book in Statistics (or similar type reviewer book) and
spend a few days reviewing material and practicing on problems given in the book's sections relevant to the subject-matter
areas described above. Other standard textbooks and references that can be used for review are:
Statistics: Methods and Applications by Hill and Lewicki
Probability and Statistical Inference by Hogg and Tanis
Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications by Larsen and Marx
Introduction to Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists by Ross and Sheldon
Probability and Statistics by DeGroot and Schervish
On-line sources to consider are:
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/esc1.html
http://dspace.mit.edu/html/1721.1/35270/14-30Fall-2004/OcwWeb/
Economics/14-30Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.html
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-05Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.html