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The course offers a broad overview of Labor Economics. These include the reasons why people work, why firms hire employees, the wages and benefits workers are paid, the educational and occupational choices individuals make, the structure and effects of unions, the structure and effects of labor market regulations, and the structure and effects of many public programs. We will also discuss important topics related to empirical research, including regression methods and causality and will focus on important challenges to empirical research in labor economics. We will review evidence drawn from low-, middle-and upper-income countries, and additional applied topics, including active labor market policies (both motivations for and performance of different strategies for helping unemployed workers find jobs), social insurance systems and their influence on the labor market, and retirement decisions and the labor market in aging economies. Applications to policy questions will provide insight into how labor supply and labor demand decisions, and the operation of the labor market differs across the institutional and economic contexts of lower-, middle- and upper-income economies.