Economics

You may think economics is the study of money, markets, and business. Although economists do study business cycles, the stock market, and inflation, economics is much more than that! Rather than a set of topics, economics is a toolkit that can be used to ask and answer questions about human behavior with the goal of improving people’s lives.

Economists study topics as diverse as the gender wage gap, health in developing countries, and the role of government programs in addressing poverty. Our program will teach you the theoretical and empirical tools that economists use to understand decision-making by individuals, firms, institutions, and governments, and how to apply those tools to solve human problems.

Our graduates go on to pursue careers in federal, state, and local government; policy and research organizations like the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, and the Brookings Institution; and private companies such as Google, Morgan Stanley, and the Boston Consulting Group. In addition, our alumni place at some of the top graduate schools in the world.

The Economics major at Colby has been designated a STEM major, with a CIP code of 45.0603 (“Econometrics and Quantitative Economics”).

We take great pride in the breadth of expertise across our faculty, who teach classes and maintain active research agendas in many different fields within the discipline.

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