Econ 309: Advanced Macroeconomics I
Welcome to this web page! This term, this class is taught by Christian
Zimmermann on Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30 AM to
10:45 AM in FS 216 (Familiy Studies Building).
Office hours for this class are Wednesdays 7:30 AM to 12:00PM,
or by appointment, in Monteith 318.
Background
This class will use the following textbook: Macroeconomics, by Steve
Williamson. It should be available at the UConn Bookstore (Co-op). Each
new book comes with a code that allows you to register on the publisher web site and enjoy some
supplementary material, such as the study guide (which I will encourage
you to use), Conference Board data and
PowerPoint files. We may use
Conference Board data (or some other data). I will not use PowerPoint.
Those who have a used textbook may not be able to log into the website,
as the codes expire after a session (once used).
A second edition of the book is now available. You may still use the first edition without much loss. The study guide is not available online anymore, but you may find a copy from previous students. The second edition has some added material that is covered by supplementary material that you can download below.
I also use this textbook for undergraduates in Intermediate Macroeconomics, but only cover part of the textbook. In this class, I expect to cover most of it, including the mathematical appendices, plus various other tidbits from elsewhere. Thus I will not assume much knowledge about macroeconomics, but I will assume that you know the following: derivations, logarithms, maximization, variance and correlation, basic matrix operations. You should know the basic definitions of macroeconomic aggregates and national accounts.
The course will cover the principles of modern, micro-founded macroeconomics. We will do a lot of graphical analysis complemented with solving the corresponding systems of equations. We will cover basically five parts: the growth model, the business cycle model, money, the open economy and overlapping generations. The last topic is not in the textbook, and we may only introduce it. So be prepared for an intensive semester...
Grades...
There will be three components to the class grade:
- Mid-term exam (33%)
- Final exam (34%)
- Various homeworks (33%), probably about three of them.
Mailing list
Students registered for this class receive regular emails with various
updates about the material covered and about grading. Be sure to give me a
valid email address that you regularly use.
To contact me:
Phone: 6-3272, Email: christian.zimmermann@uconn.edu
Supplementary material and links
Classified by chapter, not necessarily by the order we cover the topics in
class. *=required material.
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Measurement: Gross Domestic Product, Prices, Savings, and
Wealth.
- Data sources
Statistical offices
around
the world.
The Boskin
Report
- 3. Measurement: Business Cycles
- The Hodrick-Prescott
filter,
various codes for various softwares, in particular a web interface. The same for the band-pass filter.
The
article that first used the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Published two
decades after its writing...
A paper that studies whether 1600 is a good penalty for quarterly data for the HP-filter.
A paper suggesting what penalty to use for other frequencies.
US business cycle
dates, as determined by the NBER.
An
article on stylized facts for US business cycles.
A
working paper with stylized facts for many countries.
An
article on the robustness of business cycles facts through time, in
particular the comovement between output and prices.
- 4. Consumer and Firm Behavior: The Work-Leisure Decision and Profit
Maximization
- 5. A Closed-Economy One-Period Macroeconomic Model
- 6. Economic Growth: Malthus and Solow
- Economic Growth
Resources
Malthus'
Essay on the Principle of Population.
The
Penn World Tables.
An
interactive tutorial for the Solow growth model (bad link, try this)
Robert
Solow
Simon Kuznets
- 7. Income Disparities Among Countries and Endogenous Growth
- Paul
Romer
- 8. A Two-Period Model: The Consumption-Savings Decision and Ricardian Equivalence.
MyRichUncle.com
- 9. A Real Intertemporal Model with Investment
- 10. A Monetary Intertemporal Model: The Neutrality of Money Neutrality
Canadian
Tire Money
Milton Friedman
- 11. Market-Clearing Models of the Business Cycle
- The QM&RBC home page, with lots of
material on RBC theory.
The
article that started RBC theory (Kydland-Prescott 1982).
A
criticism of RBC theory by Gregory Mankiw.
A
response by Charles Plosser
A
criticism of the representative agent construct.
A
response by Charles Plosser.
Finn
Kydland
Edward
Prescott
- 12. Keynesian Business Cycle Theory: The Sticky Wage Model.
- 13. International Trade in Goods and Assets
- 14. Money in the Open Economy
- 15. Money, Inflation, and Banking
- Central banks around
the
world.
- 16. Unemployment: Search and Efficiency Wages
- 17. Inflation, the Phillips Curve, and Central Bank Commitment