Economics 338
Applied Macroeconomics
Course Description: This course teaches macroeconomics as a tool of factual, empirical and interpretive understanding of the economy. Students learn how to express economic concepts in quantitative terms, perform basic statistical analysis and interpret actual United States economic data. The main focus of this course is to make sense of macroeconomic theory, not statistics or econometrics. Although the theoretical and statistical parts in this course are integrated, the only purpose in introducing the statistics is to give the student a foundation for applying the theory to actual data. Students will learn the choice of appropriate methods for analyzing empirical economic research questions and will also study how the macroeconomics literature presents research by studying examples from journal articles.
Course Requirements: Your final grade will
be based on a weighted average of grades on exams, homework assignments,
projects and class participation (attendance). Homework assignments and
projects may involve external reading, data collection, computer use and
calculations. There will be two exams during the course and a thirty minutes
long oral presentation of your final project due near the end of the semester
to allow you the maximum amount of time to work on it. Credit for determining
the course grade will be distributed as follows:
Two exams 25% each
Oral presentation and final project 25%
Home works, projects, class attendance and participation 25%
Recommended Text: Mankiw, N. Gregory - Macroeconomics, 8-9th edition (Worth Publishers)