The objective of this course is to better understand key aspects of macroeconomic theory such as business cycles, unemployment, inflation, the financial system, aggregate demand and aggregate supply, and various economic policies. After this course, you should have a deeper understanding of some of the key issues facing the economy including the current COVID-19 recession and recovery as well as the implications of policies to address them.
This course is designed to provide students the tools needed to carry out empirical research projects in macroeconomics. We will examine current empirical methods used to identify causal effects in macroeconomics using both time series and panel data sets. We will cover different identification strategies such as timing restrictions, external instruments, and the narrative approach. We will then apply these different methods to the analysis of contemporary and historical macroeconomic data.
This course studies the interaction between political and economic forces to understand how they shape our society. We will explore a variety of topics including political business cycles, partisanship in economic policies, voting and political decisions in practice, the origins and effects of political polarization, political instability and economic growth, the rise of populism, and the political impact of immigration.
[Syllabus]
The objective of this course is to help students understand key issues in macroeconomic theory and its applications. The first part of the course discusses in some detail macroeconomic data and key issues related to specific sub-sectors of the economy: aggregate consumption/saving behavior, investment and asset markets, labor and product markets, international flows and exchange rates. The second part of the course builds on the first by integrating these sub-sectors into fully-specified macroeconomic models. These models are used to understand key problems such as inflation, unemployment and the implications of policies designed to address them.