Computational Brush-Up Course (Barcelona GSE, Fall 2013)

Dear all,

this is the website of the Computational Brush-Up Course for Barcelona GSE Master Program in Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Markets.

Here I will post all necessary information about our course: slides, homeworks, codes. Please, check the website regulary for the updates.

Syllabus of the course

1. Introduction to Matlab. Matrices.

Homework 1 (due September 5 before class). Solutions

Additional exercises. Solutions

2. Basic Data Analysis. External Data. Scripts and Functions. Debugging. Performance Measures.

Supplementary files: data.mat, WorldGDP.xls

Homework 2 (due September 9 before class. Extended due September 10 before class). Suggested solutions

3. Random Numbers. Logical Expressions

Homework 3 (due September 12 before class). Suggested solutions

m-file for the exercise 1 of the HW3 is here

Homework 4 (due September 13 before class). Suggested solutions

WorldGDP.xls file for exercise 1 could be downloaded from here

4. Graphs

Homework 5 (due September 17). Suggested solutions

Data for the Exercise 4 could be downloaded from here

Take-home Exam (due Sunday, September 22, 21.00). Solutions

Data for the exam is here

Brief Content of Classes.

Class 1 (September 2)

We learned what is Matlab and started to learn how to declare vectors and matrices.

Class 2 (September 3)

We continued with matrices. Learned special matrices, NaNs, combining matrices, adressing different elements in the matrix

For tomorrow: please do exercise 2 from here.

Tomorrow we should finish the first set of slides. So, the due date of the 1st homework will be for the September 5.

Class 3 (September 4)

We learned how to do different operations with matrices, such as "+","*", "/", "\". How to do elementwise operations: ".*", ".^", ".\". Some useful functions to work with matrices: sum, cumsum, sort, size, max,min, etc.

Fot tomorrow: please submit before the start of the tomorrow's class HW1 and exercises 3 and 4 from here.

Class 4 (September 5)

We learned how to export and import data and how to calculate some simple statistics with data.

Class 5 (September 6)

We learned how to write scripts and functions.

You have Homework 2 due Monday, September 9 before the start of the class.

Class 6 (September 9)

We learned how to debug scripts and started Logical expressions

Class 7 (September 10)

We continued with logical expressions and started to learn control structures such as if/else, loops for and while

You have Homework 3 due to Thursday, September 12

Class 8 (September 12)

We practiced with loops FOR and WHILE. You have homework 4 for tomorrow.

Class 9 (September 13)

We learned how to avoid loops and vectorize the data. We started to learn how to plot graphs.

Class 10 (September 16)

We finished with plotting graphs. And we had a very short preview of Gretl.