Course content:

The aim of this course is to provide students with an introduction to macroeconomics. The course focuses on the behavior of the economy in the short-run and middle-run, specifically looking at the goods market, the financial market and the labor market. The course is designed to help students understand how these markets operate, how they interact with each other, and how they are impacted by shocks and macroeconomic policies. 

 

Why do economies expand sometimes, raising employment and living standards, and shrinking at other times? What is a recession? What happened in 2008–09 when the world economy was hit by the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s? How did government policy respond to the crisis and was this response effective?

 

More generally, which shocks affect macroeconomic activity? How do these shocks affect output, employment, investment, or consumption? Can government policies make economies grow or stop them from shrinking? Why do we have inflation? Is inflation a bad thing? Is there anything we can do to reduce inflation? Why do we have unemployment? Do policies to reduce unemployment work? 

 

These are some of the central questions that fascinate macroeconomists. If you are curious about how macroeconomists look at the world around them, how they model it, and how this helps answering the questions you just read, then this is the course for you. 

 

Pedagogy:

The course will mainly consist of general lectures that will present and explain
macroeconomic concepts and models. Each mechanism presented in class will be embodied in a simple analytical framework to facilitate understanding of the underlying logic. Moreover, graphs will be used extensively to build intuition.