Syllabus

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Course Meeting Times

Lecture-Recitation

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1 hour / session

Recitations: 1 session / week, 1 hour / session

All Section

Sections: 2 sessions /week, 1 hour / session

Recitations: 1 session / week, 1 hour / session

Description

This course is designed to introduce classic macroeconomic issues such as growth, inflation, unemployment, interest rates, exchange rates, technological progress, and budget deficits. The course will provide a unified framework to address these issues and to study the impact of different policies, such as monetary and fiscal policies, on the aggregate behavior of individuals. These analytical tools will be used to understand the recent experience of the United States and other countries and to address how current policy initiatives affect their macroeconomic performance.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Textbooks

The text for the course is:

Abel, Andrew B., Ben S. Bernanke, and Dean Croushore. Macroeconomics. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007. ISBN: 9780321415547.

If you have the fifth edition, it is not necessary to buy the new edition as they are sufficiently similar. However, if you will be buying the book, you are encouraged to buy the sixth edition.

In addition to the textbook, we will provide some supplementary lecture notes. Also you should read The Economist (the weekly magazine) at least a couple of times a month. It provides good coverage of current economic events and will help you relate what you learn in the course to the real world.

Course Formats

The course has two alternative formats: Lecture-Recitation or All Section. Both will cover the same topics, use the same textbook, and have the same required assignments. Until the due date of the first problem set, you may switch from the Lecture-Recitation to the All Section format and from one recitation or section to another. Changing sections or recitation does not require any paperwork with the Registrar or the Department of Economics. If you wish to switch a section, just let your section teaching assistant (TA) know. If you wish to switch recitations, you may do that yourself.

Requirements

Problem Sets

Problem sets are due on the due date. We will accept late problem sets under no circumstances. You will hand in the problem sets to your TA in class for those in the All Section option or to the recitation TA for those in Professor Guerrieri's lecture. Alternatively, problem sets can be turned in at the 14.02 box until 4 p.m. on the problem set due date (be sure to place your problem set in the right stack or it will not count).

Problem sets will be returned to you during recitation by your TA or you can pick them up in the 14.02 pick-up box.

Quizzes

Each evening quiz will more or less cover the material in the lectures since the previous quiz. Each quiz will last 1.5 hours. You should, however, be ready to stay at the quiz location until 9:30 p.m. should unforeseen circumstances force us to start late.

Course Policy

On the one hand, collaboration on problem sets is permitted, but please do write up your answers separately. On the other hand, collaboration during quizzes and the final exam is strictly prohibited and is considered a breach of academic honesty. We will follow the procedures in the latest MIT Guidelines on Academic Honesty, which are given in detail in MIT's Policies and Procedures.

Grading

The course grade will be based on three quizzes and 6 problem sets. The problem set grade will be the average score of the 5 best problem set grades (your lowest score does not count towards your grade). The grade on each of the three quizzes will be standardized by the mean and the standard deviation of the 14.02 class. We will use the two highest standardized scores out of your three quizzes to compute your final grade. That means that you get to drop your worse quiz and the other two quizzes count for 45% of your grade each.