Course Overview

Welcome to Economics 3130

Global and Domestic Macroeconomics

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This course covers the fundamentals of modern macroeconomics. The course will provide you with a basic understanding of the functioning of the economy and the tools used by economists to answer macroeconomic questions. We will deal with topics such as what is aggregate output and how is it determined in an economy, what is unemployment and what can we do about it, what is inflation, what are interest rates, what can the Central Bank do to mitigate the effects of an economic crisis, or what can the Government do to improve our incomes. We will learn models that explain how all these variables change in the short-run and also in the long-run, and what is the effect of policies to address short-run economic fluctuations or to promote long-term economic growth. Many of these questions do not have a simple answer, and rather than provide you with one, the goal of the class is to develop a framework for studying these problems, along with promoting critical thinking about current macroeconomic policy debates.

As this is an 8 week course; the pace of the class is quite fast. Make sure that you allocate enough time to study each weeks' material and do the required problems and activities. Each week builds on things that are studied in previous weeks, so the more comfortable you feel with the material of previous weeks, the easier it will be to grasp the new material.

The course has two basic sources of required materials. One is the book. We will only cover a few chapters of the book, but we will cover them in depth. The second source of required materials is the list of In-Class problems. This is a list of problems for which I provide the answer key. Learning how to solve these problems is a fundamental part of the class. Learn how to do these problems, so you will do well in this class.

Here is an introductory video describing the basic organization of the course: