Areas of Emphasis
Students are required to complete an "area of emphasis" taking a minimum of five courses or 15 credits in specialized theory or methods courses.
Students may choose one of the defined areas, or they may design an area of emphasis of their own with courses selected in conjunction with his/her mentor, based on past course work, experience, proposed dissertation topic, and career goals.
Economics or Finance
This area of emphasis is for PhD students in the Department of Health Services interested in doctoral level study in health economics, either emphasizing health economics as a general area of study or managerial (corporate) finance in health services as a specific focus. The program is best suited for students with strong undergraduate or masters-level preparation in microeconomics, one year of undergraduate calculus (differentiation, integration, and applications, e.g., Taylor expansions), and an undergraduate course in matrix algebra. Doctoral students focusing on managerial finance should have completed at least one foundation course in corporate finance at the upper-division or masters level undergraduate level, in addition to the preparation in mathematics and microeconomics outlined above.
The purpose of this area of emphasis is to augment doctoral-level training in health services with a carefully selected set of graduate-level courses in economics and/or finance. The desired end-result is a sophisticated health services researcher capable of doing high-quality research and teaching in health economics and/or the financial economics of health care. The required discipline-based training in economics and finance is designed to prepare PhD graduates with sufficient mathematical and theoretical sophistication to understand and apply the literature and research in those parent disciplines in a variety of health services contexts.
