Professor Asker is the best econ professor I've ever had at UCLA. He's one of the very few econ professors who actually do care about teaching. Knowing that I have major time conflicts with his office hours, he was always willing to stay late after the lectures to answer all my questions and was super patient the entire time. His midterms and finals are extremely fair games as long as you attend all the lectures and pay attention to the parts he highlights on. I screwed up my midterm but did quite well on the final in which case I still got an A since his midterm can be dropped according to his various grading schedules which really work towards students' interests to the max. Prof Asker always extends his class materials to the research he has worked or is currently working on. Highly recommend this class with professor Asker.

Genuinely the best professor I've had for econ. Aside from doing interesting research, he can actually teach a class in an interesting matter. He also is great at demonstrating the relevance of class material in today's world. Tests are tough, but it is worth actually learning material.

Fall 2020 was the first quarter this course/professor were online so earlier reviews are not accurate if taking this class virtually.

All lectures are pre-recorded and posted on Youtube every week. No slides are posted. After week 2, there's an assignment every single week. Each assignment is worth 10% of your grade (but drop the lowest score). There are 4 problem sets and 3 essays (yes, 4-6 page essays in an econ elective).
Each assignment, without exaggeration, takes anywhere from 15-30 hours. Yes, I have literally spent 30 hours on random weekly assignments. That's not 30 hours where I'm stopping for breaks or food or youtube/netflix breaks; I'm talking 30 hours of focused thinking and work.

This is mainly because the essays are worded vaguely on purpose. This is to mimic real-world situations, where the info will not be super clear. While it seems helpful to mimic the real world, the lack of clarity leads to a lot of confusion and stress. The TA's are not always on the same page as the professor, and despite their best efforts, may often interpret a prompt differently (aka wrong). The professor also is not always super clear about what he expects on each assignment. He'll answer base-level questions about wording or what a number means, but he'll rarely give hints big enough to clarify confusing prompts. So you'll inevitably spend hours and hours scrambling for ideas with no clue of what to do. I have had multiple mental breakdowns as a result.

The final was an essay that appeared to be relatively ok. However, the Professor sent out an email at 10 PM the night before it was due with new info that seemingly contradicted the original prompt. So....yeah. Lots of panic.

This was undoubtedly the hardest economics course I have ever taken. This includes the 11/41/101 "weeder" series and the 102 "gpa destroyer." And from most people I've talked to, the econ electives are supposed to be a lot easier than the core courses. If you sign up to take this course virtually, expect 15-30 hours of work minimum, and lots of stress/confusion as to what's expected from students. I recommend staying away at all costs.

I highly recommend this class for anyone trying to go into consulting.
The class is relatively easy (my grade sucked because I slacked off during finals seasons)
John is funny and a great teacher.
His powerpoints, however, can be vague so take good notes!

BUT If you hate microecon, I wouldn't pick this class. It's basically all about bertrand, cournot, and monopoly model.

It's very clear through this class that Professor Asker is an expert in his field, and really knows what he's talking about. That being said, even though I ended up with an A in the class, I really question at what cost I got the grade. The reviews below are accurate in saying that the workload in this class is INSANE. Each assignment took my soul from me, and as soon as I pressed submit on the Turnitin link, there was another assignment waiting for me on CCLE. Each week, we were either given an alternating looooong essay (think 2000 words average), or a problem set that looked nothing like the examples he would show us in lecture. The essay asked us to analyze a real-world economic circumstance, but in that vain the details he provided were extremely fuzzy and not very informative, so I would often take days to sit down and write notes on the thing, and then cram the essay-writing in a few hours. The problem sets had questions that often seemed just impossible to solve. The worst part was that this class was curved according to the Econ dept's 25-50-25 curve.
I found, however, that I did become much more aware of mergers around me, and even reading about recent ones in the news, I started analyzing it in my head using the tools I learnt in this class. Luckily, this quarter was a bit light academically for me, but given that Econ electives are meant to be more about learning as opposed to slogging like the core classes, I likely wouldn't recommend this class (but I feel bad bc John genuinely is a great guy).

I honestly think Professor Asker is a cool guy, but this class sure wasn't. I agree with the other reviews... the way the class is formatted online is frankly ridiculous for an undergraduate course. He essentially gives a final every week in the form of an essay with a purposefully vague prompt or a problem set with problems he didn't adequately cover in his two lectures a week. His lectures are youtube videos, which are nice for review and were helpful, but not helpful enough to answer his problem sets or essays. I think there were seven assignments and one final, which comprised your entire grade.

It got really exhausting after a while. You'd slog through an assignment, taking upwards of seven hours, and then as soon as you turn it in there's another assignment that's due the next week. It never ended until finals week.

His grading scale is pretty generous. A lot of people dropped the course and he included it when he calculated the curve, so I got an A in the class even though I was pretty much exactly at or slightly above the mean score on every assignment. Again, I don't have anything against the professor, I think he's cool, but I really hope he changes how he teaches this class next quarter.

This is a review for his 101 class. your welcome. Great professor, makes the content as digestable as possible. He also makes it actually relevant to things going on at the time, like activision Microsoft merger and other news events. Grading is very nice too, upper quartiles on midterms/tests are a solid A. Definitely take this guy