The agricultural economics option deals with economic issues related to food and fiber supply and demand and the natural resource base that supports agricultural production and societal needs. Students will have expertise applicable to public decision making and private decisions of farms, ranches, and agribusinesses.<br>Economics studies the allocation of resources between competing and alternative uses. Students gain an understanding of consumer and firm-level decision making and how the economic system functions and can be influenced. It is both a rigorous and flexible program of study that provides analytical tools and aids in the student's development of problem-solving skills for economic analysis, while allowing individuals the opportunity to explore specific areas of interest in various fields of economics. Majors study macroeconomics, which addresses issues such as the level of output and prices, inflation, and unemployment within the economy, microeconomics, which pertains to how consumers make purchase decisions and utilize their time as well as how firms make decisions on what to produce and who to employ, and econometrics, which provides the technical tools to estimate economic models from data and to forecast economic outcomes. Application areas include such topics as health care, sports, tax policy, financial markets, international marketing and trade, and natural resources.