This textbook offers a complete course in applied macroeconomics at the intermediate level that emphasizes the application of economic theory to real-world data and policy. Topics covered include national and international income, financial accounts, business cycles, financial markets, economic growth, labor markets, aggregate supply and demand, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. The text is unique in developing a detailed toolkit of elementary statistics and graphical techniques for economic data. A strength is its detailed treatment of national and international financial markets and the institutions of monetary and fiscal policy, which makes it especially helpful in understanding recent economic crises. The website for the text is found at http://www.appliedmacroeconomics.com.
First published in 2001, Causality in Macroeconomics addresses the long-standing problems of causality while taking macroeconomics seriously. The practical concerns of the macroeconomist and abstract concerns of the philosopher inform each other. Grounded in pragmatic realism, the book rejects the popular idea that macroeconomics requires microfoundations, and argues that the macroeconomy is a set of structures that are best analyzed causally. Ideas originally due to Herbert Simon and the Cowles Commission are refined and generalized to non-linear systems, particularly to the non-linear systems with cross-equation restrictions that are ubiquitous in modern macroeconomic models with rational expectations (with and without regime-switching). These ideas help to clarify philosophical as well as economic issues. The structural approach to causality is then used to evaluate more familiar approaches to causality due to Granger, LeRoy and Glymour, Spirtes, Scheines and Kelly, as well as vecto
The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics stakes out a pragmatic middle-ground between traditional, prescriptive economic methodology and recent descriptive (sociological or rhetorical) methodology. The former is sometimes seen as arrogantly telling economists how to do their work and the latter as irrelevant to their practice. The lectures are built around a case study of a concrete example of macroeconomic analysis. They demonstrate that economic methodology and the philosophy of science offer insights that help to resolve the genuine concerns of macroeconomists. Some examples of questions addressed include: What is the relationship between theoretical models and empirical observations? What is the relevance of macroeconomics to policy? Should macroeconomics be viewed as a special case of microeconomics? What is the place of long-standing philosophical issues in macroeconomics, such as the scope and nature of economic laws, the role of idealizations, methodological individualism, a
This textbook offers a complete course in applied macroeconomics at the intermediate level that emphasizes the application of economic theory to real-world data and policy. Topics covered include national and international income, financial accounts, business cycles, financial markets, economic growth, labor markets, aggregate supply and demand, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. The text is unique in developing a detailed toolkit of elementary statistics and graphical techniques for economic data. A strength is its detailed treatment of national and international financial markets and the institutions of monetary and fiscal policy, which makes it especially helpful in understanding recent economic crises. The website for the text is found at http://www.appliedmacroeconomics.com.
First published in 2001, Causality in Macroeconomics addresses the long-standing problems of causality while taking macroeconomics seriously. The practical concerns of the macroeconomist and abstract concerns of the philosopher inform each other. Grounded in pragmatic realism, the book rejects the popular idea that macroeconomics requires microfoundations, and argues that the macroeconomy is a set of structures that are best analyzed causally. Ideas originally due to Herbert Simon and the Cowles Commission are refined and generalized to non-linear systems, particularly to the non-linear systems with cross-equation restrictions that are ubiquitous in modern macroeconomic models with rational expectations (with and without regime-switching). These ideas help to clarify philosophical as well as economic issues. The structural approach to causality is then used to evaluate more familiar approaches to causality due to Granger, LeRoy and Glymour, Spirtes, Scheines and Kelly, as well as vecto
The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics stakes out a pragmatic middle-ground between traditional, prescriptive economic methodology and recent descriptive (sociological or rhetorical) methodology. The former is sometimes seen as arrogantly telling economists how to do their work and the latter as irrelevant to their practice. The lectures are built around a case study of a concrete example of macroeconomic analysis. They demonstrate that economic methodology and the philosophy of science offer insights that help to resolve the genuine concerns of macroeconomists. Some examples of questions addressed include: What is the relationship between theoretical models and empirical observations? What is the relevance of macroeconomics to policy? Should macroeconomics be viewed as a special case of microeconomics? What is the place of long-standing philosophical issues in macroeconomics, such as the scope and nature of economic laws, the role of idealizations, methodological individualism, a
This collection addresses the history of modern growth economics and the role of the American economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow in developing it as a major area of research in macroeconomics a
For some twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, the IS-LM model dominated macroeconomics. Inspired by the work of John Maynard Keynes, this model demonstrates the relationship among
Real Business Cycle theory combines the remains of monetarism with the new classical macroeconomics, and has become one of the dominant approaches within contemporary macroeconomics today. This volume
