Homework assignment: modern macro book outine
January 16th, 2009Dear eminent-macro-economist-who-would-have-a-chance-in-hell-to-get-this-to-stick -
Please write this book.
- Intro
- Intertemporal consumption choice
- Growth
- Growth policy
- Labor or leasure choice
- Worker flows and unemployment
- Expectations (including learning stuff)
- Business cycles
- Monetary policy
- Political economy and fiscal policy
Love,
Those-of-us-that-will-actually-have-to-teach-this-crap
January 17th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Teach from your notes, if you have the power to decide what to use.
Then again, the only different I see between your outline and some textbooks is the ordering of subjects. Charles I Jones might have a textbook (intermediate) you’d like.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:37 am
P.S.
“Labor or leasure choice” … this is way over-emphasized. There’s little variation on that margin, at all interesting frequencies.
“Growth policy”… Uh… Fiscal policy, you mean?
January 17th, 2009 at 10:32 am
“Growth policy” is growth policy not fiscal policy. It may be enacted through the same political process, but we’re not political scientists.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I meant that if the set of policy instruments is the same, it’s hard to tell them apart.
Re: fiscal policy, sure, there’s a problem about whether you want to teach “optimal policy” or “political equilibrium policy”, but I see little coverage of that in undergraduate texts.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Given what we’ve learned in macro in the last 60 years (i.e. the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy at least in “normal” times), I’d say the study of fiscal policy is a descriptive science, i.e. political economy. Growth policy is normative.