TEACHING

Courses I teach or have taught in the past few years

• Economics of Central Banking. Part-time 2nd-year MSc course targeted at government and private sector employees. The topics covered include the historical evolution of monetary systems and central banks, alternative forms of monetary exchange (commodity standards, fiat money, ledgers of transactions, cryptocurrencies, interest-bearing reserves), classic topics in the interactions between monetary and fiscal policy, financial intermediaries and inside money, central bank lending and fully-backed money, the quantitative methodology of DSGE models, the New-Keynesian model, monetary policy and its effects on mortgage and housing markets, and monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates.

• Macroeconomics II: Recursive Methods. First-year PhD course at QMUL covering recursive methods: Markov processes, dynamic programming, and the recursive competitive equilibrium. In each topic it discusses the issues of existence, uniqueness and convergence and problems with both continuous and discrete variables.  The concepts are demonstrated at the backdrop of the real business cycle model, the New-Keynesian model, asset pricing, and models with heterogeneous agents. Each part of the course is accompanied by computational exercises. The course is preceded by a crash course on the basics of programming and numerical methods.

• Business Cycles. Third-year undergraduate course at QMUL. Using two- or three- period OLG models with simple functional forms, in order to avoid the burden of complicated dynamic optimization, the course introduces students to modern dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomics. After covering the classic topics of the OLG model (the planner's problem and a decentralized monetary equilibrium), the course covers the real business cycle theory and then spends most of the time on recent research on housing in macroeconomics. Students are also introduced to calibration and GMM estimation. The implications of the models are confronted with the standard business cycle statistics as well as the recent boom-bust in the housing market. Depending on the year, the course also covers government debt sustainability, the macroeconomic consequences of ageing population, models of liquidity and bank runs, and models with hand-to-mouth and permanent income hypothesis households.

• Housing in Macroeconomics. Second-year PhD macro topics course taught at the London School of Economics. The aim is to get students quickly to the frontier of research on the macroeconomic aspects of housing. The course covers three areas, focusing on the main research questions, tools, data, and some recent papers: i) housing and the business cycle, ii) tenure, mortgage, and portfolio choice, and iii) housing and monetary policy.

• Monetary Economics. MSc level course taught at the London School of Economics. Starts with the basic RBC model and in a one-thing-at-a-time fashion introduces inflation and the nominal interest rate, commodity price shocks, fiscal policy, sticky prices, sticky wages, and a banking sector with inside and outside money. The course concludes with the basics of consumption-based dynamic asset pricing theory and affine models of the term structure (with applications to monetary policy). The aim is to provide insight into the equilibrium effects of the various features of typical DSGE models without assuming any knowledge of computational methods.