Public Economics ― The Macroeconomic Perspective

Today, the most pressing challenges for public economics are of macroeconomic nature: pensions, debt, income distribution, and fiscal sustainability. All these problems are compounded by the phenomenon of demographic transition and aging. This graduate textbook addresses these issues with the help of state-of-the-art macroeconomic tools that are based on a sound microfoundation and rooted in empirical evidence. Different from the standard partial-equilibrium analysis in traditional textbooks on public economics, the concept of general equilibrium helps to account for compensating or amplifying side-effects of economic policy.

GAUSS and MATLAB computer code as well as teaching material (slides) are available as downloads from the author's homepage.

Burkhard Heer is professor of public economics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Previously, he was professor of economics at the Universities of Bolzano, Bamberg, and Innsbruck. Burkhard Heer received his Phd in economics from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 1996. He was visiting scholar at various institutions including Georgetown University, Stanford University, Fordham University at New York, University of Quebec at Montreal, University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Federal Reserve Bank at St. Louis, and a summer intern at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. Burkhard Heer is also affiliated with the Center for Economic Studies (CESifo), Munich. His research interests include public economics and macroeconomics. He also published a Springer textbook on “Dynamic General Equilibrium Modeling” with Alfred Mausner.