Wake Forest Economics Department

Economics is about understanding the behavior of people. In particular, economics seeks to address how the world can be understood based on the incentives that various economic agents face. In practice, the study of economics involves using both conceptual and empirical tools to examine how people make choices. This theoretical and data work is, in turn, crucial in informing policymakers how to make their decisions.

Our majors gain strong quantitative skills through their courses and end up working in a vast array of professions: consulting, healthcare, banking, finance, pharmaceuticals, and real estate, to name a few, while others find careers in non-profit and public sectors. We also send our students to graduate school in law, business, economics, or public policy to name a few. 

Our majors also tend to have substantial earning power based on their economics degree. According to the Wall Street Journal’s “Degrees That Pay You Back” data, economics majors have the highest mid-career median salary of any non-engineering major.

So, please come visit us in the department and talk to our many faculty about your future major in economics!

NEWS

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  Lessons from the Rise of Netflix and the Fall of Blockbuster
  Creative destruction can do a lot of good for the economy—if we let it. Dr. John Dalton and Andrew Logan (‘21) talk about the rise of Netflix and the fall of Blockbuster in an article they wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education. It discusses the role of innovation and creative destruction in the economy. […]
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  How to Predict the Presidency
  Are betting markets more accurate than polls? Economics professor Koleman Strumpf participated in a discussion on presidential election betting in this episode of Freakonomics. “For regular people, the amount of information you can get out of these markets is vast. It’s the best,” he said. “Because this is such a contentious election, […]
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  U.S. election betting: Regulated presidential markets are live
  Two U.S.-regulated, dollar-denominated prediction markets began taking bets on the presidential race this week with a month to go before Election Day. “It will be hard for the two sites to catch up, but that is not entirely impossible,” economics professor Koleman Strumpf told CoinDesk. “More than half of all trades will […]
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  America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny
  Economics Professor, Dr. Robert Whaples was quoted in the New York Times!

EVENTS