Theme 3 – Business Behaviour and the Labour Market
When taught: September-April Year 13 (taught concurrently with Theme 4)
Specification link: Pearson Edexcel | Economics A Specification 2015
What are we learning?
Revenues, Costs and Profit (1)
- Derivation of curves – competitive and imperfectly competitive
- Identification of profit
- Economies of Scale
Business Growth
- Size and type of firms
- Business growth and demergers
Business Objectives
Revenues, Costs and Profit (2)
- Recap all curves
- Development of diagrammatic analysis
- Changes in curves to impact types of profit, loss
- Efficiencies
Market Structures
- Perfect competition
- Monopoly
- Government intervention
- Oligopoly
- Government intervention
- Monopolistic competition
- Contestability
- Government intervention
- Monopsony
- Government intervention
Labour Market
- Demand and supply of labour
- Wage determination
- Government Intervention
Government Intervention
Further interventions and the impact of those interventions
Where does this fit into our past and future learning?
Theme 1 builds a foundation of knowledge around the theories of a perfectly competitive market. This is put into question at the end of the unit with a significant amount of work on market failure. In Theme 3 we build on the theories of a perfectly competitive market and extend it towards firms within these markets, and then to firms that act in an imperfectly competitive way to the other theoretical extreme of a monopoly. We also incorporate a discussion of the labour market in both a competitive model and a more realistic imperfectly competitive model taking elements developed earlier in the unit. At each stage we then look at policy that can be put in place by government to manage the more dominant firms and employers and the impact of those regulations be them positive or negative.
How will we be assessed?
Assessments will consist of questions from past exam papers. There will be a combination of multiple choice, short-answer and extended answer, context-based questions.
What makes a strong piece of work in this topic? What are teachers hoping to see?
- Good knowledge and understanding of key ideas and concepts
- Effective use of subject specific terminology
- Appropriate use of provided contexts to exemplify answers
- Accurate calculations and/or fully labelled, accurate diagrams which are then used within written responses
- Fully developed analysis using chains of reasoning to add complexity and detail within written responses
What additional resources can I access outside of lessons?
