Quantitative Macroeconomics [F2019]

"The era of closed-form solutions for their own sake should be over. Newer generations get similar intuitions from computer-generated examples than from functional expressions," Jose-Victor Rios-Rull (JME, 2008).


Course Description:

Quantitative Macroeconomics (Unit I) follows the first year PhD macro sequence. The goal of this course is to equip you with a wide set of tools to (i) solve macroeconomic models with heterogenous agents (aka Aiyagari-Bewley-Hugget-Imrohoroglu, ABHI) economies and (ii) relate these models to data to answer quantitative questions. You will learn to do so by doing. That is, this course will require intensive computational work by students.

The ABHI economies are the industry standard in macro. These economies can take the form of infinite horizon, lifecycle environments and overlapping generations (or some hybrid of these). Importantly, the presence of heterogeneity requires taking good care of distributions and aggregate consistency. We will discuss carefully how to do this in both stationary and nonstationary environments.

This course is demanding and I expect you to be engaged continuously from day one. The grade will be some weighted average of regular homework sets and a final project.

We meet Mondays and Wednesdays 15:00-16:30 in the UAB Seminar room.


Class Diary:


TA sessions:


Homework Sets

Students should expect one homework per foreseeable week of class. To post your HWK solutions you must open a GitHub account and send me (and Albert) a link with your course folder. You must also create a subfolder per HWK. In each subfolder (i.e., HWK), you must upload a readme file that organizes the subfolder, all the code necessary to generate your solutions, and a pdf [or any other form of easy-to-read output] where you discuss your results: