Lecture 1st semester
Master in International Economics & Public Policy (MIEPP)
Lecturer: Klaus Wälde
Tutorial: Hoang Van Khieu
Overview
The Master lecture on advanced macroeconomics teaches macroeconomic topics whereby ’advanced’ carries two meanings. First, more emphasis is put on model building and formal backgrounds of economic models than in Bachelor lectures. Students will learn about dynamic programming as a tool to solve maximization problems, will get a feeling for the role uncertainty plays in economic decision making and macroeconomics, and will learn some basics about stochastic processes required to understand e.g. the dynamics of innovation and growth or the dynamics of hiring and firing on labour markets.
Second, advanced is also understood in the sense of psychologically better founded decision processes of individuals. It has long been recognized that standard assumptions about preferences, which inter alia exclude conflicting motivations of an individual, time inconsistencies or emotions, are an obstacle to fully understanding human behaviour. This lecture will therefore teach classic models of macroeconomics and occasionally discuss extensions which take a more psychological approach to human behaviour.
The lecture will cover three macroeconomic topics: Economic growth, business cylces and unemployment. From the perspective of behavioural macroeconomics, we will discuss the role of conflicting motivations (dual-self models) for economic growth, of time-inconsistencies for understanding business cycles and of stress for understanding the dynamics of unemployment.
Organisation
The slides for the lecture are now available. Due to the shorter winter term and due to the new chapter 8 on Covid-19, we will not cover all chapters in the lecture. The plan is to cover chapters 1-3, 6-8 and 11-12.
The lecture will be offered online only. We will use MS-Teams and registered participants will find the invitation to the virtual meeting room in JGU-LMS. Please make yourself familiar with MS-Teams before the lectures start. We will allow for breaks during the lecture (say after 40 and after 80 minutes) to give time for questions and discussion. The lecture will be recorded and the video will be available in JGU-LMS. You can also ask questions via ILIAS.