Lecture Notes: Intermediate Public Economics

These lecture notes are designed for intermediate-level courses in public economics, based on the curriculum taught for year-3 undergraduates (Instructor: Prof. Xiumei Yu). I personally took this course in the Fall of 2024, and I have also referred to the slides used for this course from 2023 to 2025. The material bridges the gap between introductory public finance and advanced graduate-level training, providing students with a solid foundation in both theoretical frameworks and empirical applications.

The notes are organized around four core themes: welfare economics and market failures, the economics of externalities and public goods, social insurance, and taxation.

Each chapter combines rigorous mathematical derivations with intuitive explanations, real-world examples, and discussions of seminal empirical papers from leading journals. Special attention is given to the fundamental theorems of welfare economics, the Samuelson rule for public goods, the Coase theorem, optimal taxation theory, and the asymmetric information in insurance markets.

Benefiting from the leisure time after completing graduate school applications, I have had the opportunity to compile these lecture notes. I hope the notes serve as a useful resource for both instructors and students in their exploration of public economics.

You can download them for self-learning here: Lecture Notes and the Chinese version 中级公共经济学 .