Macro bootcamp

Updated: March 2018

The Macro Bootcamp is a short and intensive reading group that serves as a refresher for a graduate level class in contemporary macroeconomics. It aims to cover the seminal texts of the most prominent schools of thought, and act as a foundation for applications to current policy debates.

1. Advanced reading

Participants are advised to read the following book, which provides an excellent introduction to modern macroeconomics from a school-of-thought approach. The interviews at the end of the book in particular are worth attention:

2. Reading list: key articles

Note: this reading list is heavily influenced by Tyler Cowen’s Macro I Reading List, Fall 2006 (.pdf). For a previous version of that, see here.

History of thought/background

Real Business Cycles

New Keynesian economics

Monetary policy

3. The podcast

Here is an audio version of my own lecture notes:

4. Further reading

The classic graduate text for macro is David Romer. It is the best treatment of the alternative growth models, and then has a chapter on each variable of national income accounting. Participants are advised to grapple with it after the bootcamp has taken place.

It is also a good idea to see how various Austrian, Keynesian and Monetarist ideas can be integrated into a heterodox narrative. See Arnold Kling’s “Lectures on Macroeconomics“.

Note: the lectures above feed into the Monetary Theory and Policy Workshop