Teaching
I teach macroeconomics, money and banking, and monetary economics at undergraduate level and time series at graduate level.
Our Econ Club has very active Facebook group. If you are curious about economics and want to read more, join us. Our department has LinkedIn group of students and alumni. If you are curious about where our students work, join us.
Few pieces of advice to our Econ majors:
ECON307, Money and Banking
This course is about financial markets (stock, bond market, derivative, and foreign exchange markets), financial institutions (mainly banks), and monetary policy. We will explore the role of money, financial instruments, banking system, and monetary policy in the economy. We will discuss current and past economic events in light of our newly acquired appreciation of the financial system.
In this class will learn how to answer questions like: What is the purpose of a financial system? How would Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy affect price Richmond’s bonds? How to predict interest on one-year bond in 2018? Where does the money go when your stock or house loses value? Why did Warren Buffet compared derivatives to weapons of mass destruction? And many, many more.
ECON641, Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
The course is about forecasting with applications to economics, finance, business, and marketing. We will learn to decompose the data (time series) into simple components: trends, seasonal components, time-varying volatility, and so on; then, we will model each component separately. Uncovering typical components of series improves forecast accuracy. I will emphasize the use of loss functions for choosing among many possible forecast. While I will mainly motivate discussion using economic examples, economic background is not required for the course. Students from other departments should find the course useful. We will use STATA and Matlab for homework assignments and examples.
A second goal for this class is to acquire a better feel for statistics by using and creating Monte Carlo simulations.
Finally, we will work on your ability to explain statistics to non-statisticians (most of people around you).
ECON211, Introduction to Macroeconomics
In class we study how economies grow over decades and how they fall into recessions and recover.
ECON461, Senior Seminar (Monetary Economics)
In class we will split into teams and compete in a game that is similar to the College Fed Challenge competition. Unlike the Fed Challenge, we will not compete with other universities. Each team will prepare a presentation that assesses the state of U.S. economy and will recommend appropriate monetary policy. After you finished your presentation judges will ask you questions. Here is a good summary and here is an example.
This is not a usual, lecture style class where the primary objective is to teach you a lot of new material. Instead, we will work hard on developing your ability to use and apply what you already learned in Intro to Macroeconomics (Econ211), Macroeconomic Theory (Econ302), and Money and Banking (Econ307) about macroeconomics and monetary policy. You will learn new things along the way, but this is not the main objective of our class. Mostly class will be organized as discussions and presentations with very few small lectures if needed. Also, there will be a small writing project.