Macroeconomics I

Objectives

The objective (*) of this course is to study techniques to analyse macroeconomics issues such as economic growth, investments, the effect of government policies and asset pricing.

We start the course with models of economic growth formulated as optimal control in continuous time. We study topics such as growth, savings and the evolution of capital.

We then focus on models formulated recursively, in a way in which agents decide their next action based on realization of the current state. Most of the course focus on this part.

This formulation is especially useful   to study economics under uncertainty. We will see applications to topics such as growth under uncertainty and asset pricing.

(* the updated course’s syllabus will be available to students at the beginning of each academic term)

General characterization

Code

6118

Credits

8

Responsible teacher

Prof Doutor André Castro Silva

Hours

Weekly - Available soon

Total - Available soon

Teaching language

English

Prerequisites

n/a 


Bibliography

The main textbooks are:

Barro and Sala-i-Martin (2003). Economic Growth, 2nd Ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2018). Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, 4th Ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.

McCandless (2008). The ABCs of RBCs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Barro and Sala-i-Martin will be used for economic growth. Ljungqvist and Sargent and McCandless 


Teaching method

There will be several problems set to study the topics of the course. 


Evaluation method

Final grade = 0.40*Midterm + 0.60*Final Exam 

 

Subject matter

Economic Growth

Introduction. Data

The neoclassical growth model

Endogenous growth 

Productivity and the allocation of talent

Economic growth as dynamic programming problem

Stochastic economic grow

Quadratic dynamic programming

Stochastic linear equations in macroeconomics 

Money

Asset pricing

Optimal taxation 

Programs

Programs where the course is taught: