Intermediate Macro Notes

Below are some of my teaching notes for Econ 3102, Intermediate Macroeconomics.

I’ve prepared these notes for several reasons:

• As a teaching aide, to highlight and outline points I wish to make during lectures.
• As a study aide. The textbook we use for the course¹ covers a similar range of material, but it can often be helpful for students to see the same material presented several different ways.
• To collect some resources and links which are relevant to the lecture material. I often like to pull up a graph from FRED or similar in the middle of a lecture, and it’s handy to have those links collected together.

If you are one of my students and have come across this page, please be aware that all material here is also posted on Canvas.

¶ Topics Covered

¶ Measurement

The course begins with a discussion of Macroeconomic Measurement.

Whenever we talk about the macroeconomy, we’re essentially taking the vast array of decisions that people make, the total of all human activity, and distilling these complex interactions down into a few summary statistics.

Each of these statistics is a carefully designed human invention. And so despite their necessarily simplified nature, macroeconomic aggregates are incredibly valuable tools for understanding the world.

These concepts should be familiar to students who have taken an Introductory Macro course, although we do go into more detail in some some cases.

• GDP and Other Measures of Production
• Prices, Price Indices, and Chain-weighting
• National Savings
• Labor Aggregates
• Business Cycle Definitions
• Money Concepts

¶ A Simple One-Period Competitive Equilibrium Model

• The Consumer’s Optimization Problem
• The Firm’s Profit Maximization Problem
• Combining the Agents into a Competitive Equilbrium Model

¶ Other Simple Macro Models

• Solow and Malthus
• McCall Job Search Model

¶ A Two Period Competitive Equilibrium

• Two-Period Endowment Economy
• Credit Market Imperfections
• Social Security
• Two Period Firm
• Two Period Equilibrium and Shocks
• Money and Business cycles
• Small Open Economy
• Exchange Rates

Other:

• Bank Runs