• document stylized facts in macroeconomics using relevant data sources and statistical methods;
• critically assess the validity of different forms of evidence in macroeconomics, and their usefulness to inform macroeconomic theories and policies;
• apply statistical methods to produce evidence relevant for macroeconomic analysis;
• articulate the empirical implications of key macroeconomic theories and models;
• understand how to identify and estimate macroeconomic shocks and impulse responses;
• understand cross-sectional research designs to quantify causal effects in macroeconomics.

Brief description: This course considers the use of time-series and cross-sectional data to answer macroeconomic questions such as: what are the sources of fluctuations in unemployment?, what are the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on economic activity?, do expansions in credit supply cause economic recessions?

Aims and expected learning outcomes: The goal is to introduce students to research questions, statistical methods and data sources used in modern macroeconomic research. This course is not a methods course, nor a theory course. Rather, it is an applied course, focusing on how to obtain empirical answers to macroeconomic questions by a combination of theory, statistical methods, and data.

Students will gain hands-on experience with data and statistical methods to analyse it, and learn to critically evaluate empirical designs and research strategies. 

This course should be especially relevant for students considering working in central banks, the financial industry, the government or international organizations (e.g. IMF, OECD, World Bank), and/or wanting to write a master’s dissertation with a substantial empirical component.

Content and structure: As with any empirical science, we will start by covering some key macroeconomic facts. We will spend some time discussing how these facts are established from existing data sources and learn statistical techniques to summarize the relevant variation in the data.

A substantial part of empirical macroeconomic research aims to perform dynamic causal inference. We want to identify and quantify the effect of exogenous variation in variable X on one or more outcomes of interest Y over several periods. For that purpose, we will introduce the concepts of macroeconomic shock and impulse response, and study how both can be identified, estimated, and interpreted in light of relevant macroeconomic theories.

A central feature of empirical macroeconomics is the role played by theory in guiding empirical work. We will introduce/review a few macroeconomic theories to help us motivate/structure the research question, draw their empirical implications, and use them to interpret empirical results.

The last section of the course covers cross-sectional approaches to identify macroeconomic causal effects. We will introduce the concept of identified moment and learn its usefulness for macroeconomic research, and study different research designs used to obtain identified moments.

Pedagogical approach: The course follows a specific-general-specific approach. We will focus on a set of concrete questions (e.g. what are the sources of fluctuations in unemployment, what are the effects of monetary and fiscal shocks on economic activity?). Next, we will cover general empirical strategies and statistical methods that can be used to answer them. Last, we will focus on answering the specific questions by applying those approaches and methods to real-world data using statistical software, or by analysing how classic scientific articles have done it.

Journal articles and selected textbook chapters. 

If you want to have a taste of what we will cover, have a look at the two papers below published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives 2018 symposium on Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession. 

Identification in Macroeconomics, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson.

Finance and Business Cycles: The Credit-Driven Household Demand Channel, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi.