20th-21st November 2009, London

1.    What is Money?

• Menger, Carl, 1976, “The Theory of Money” (Chapter 8, in Principles of Economics, p.257-286)
• Salerno, Joseph T., 1987, “The “True” Money Supply: A Measure of the Supply of the Medium of Exchange in the U.S. economy” Austrian Economics Newsletter, Ludwig von Mises Institute
• Shostak, Frank, 2000, “The Mystery of the Money Supply Definition” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.69-76

2.    The Interest Rate and Intertemporal Coordination

• Mises, Ludwig von, 1953 [1912], The Theory of Money and Credit Yale University Press (Excerpts: Chapter 19, pp.339-367)
• Hayek, Friedrich A., 2008 [1931], Prices and Production Mises Institute (Excerpts: Lecture 2, pp. 223-252; Lecture 3, pp.253-276)
• Sweeny, Joan and Richard James Sweeny.  1977, Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op Crisis: Comment, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Volume 9, Feb., pp. 886-89

3.    The Gold Standard and the Great Depression

• Rothbard, Murray, 2005 [1963], What has government done to our money? Mises Institute (Excerpts: pp.159-170)
• Reed, Lawrence, 2005, “Great Myths of the Great Depression” Mackinac Center for Public Policy
• White, Lawrence H.  2008, “Is the Gold Standard Still the Gold Standard among Monetary Systems?” Cato Institute Briefing Papers, No. 100

4.    Deflation and Prosperity

• Rothbard, Murray, 2005 [1962], The Case for a 100% Reserve Dollar Mises Institute (Excerpts: Chapter 10, pp.180-186)
• Selgin, George, 1997, Less than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy Institute of Economic Affairs, Hobart Paper No. 132 (Excerpts: pp.9-41; 70-72)

5.    Free Banking vs 100% reserves

• Mises, Ludwig von, 1953 [1912], “Peel’s Act” in The Theory of Money and Credit Yale University Press (Excerpts: Chapter 20, pp. 368-373)
• White, Lawrence H. 2009 [1984], Free Banking in Britain: Theory, Experience, and Debate, 1800-1845, Institute of Economic Affairs (Excerpts: Chapter 5, pp.89-135)
• Selgin, George, 1997, Less than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy” Institute of Economic Affairs, Hobart Paper No. 132 (Excerpts: pp. 67-69)
• De Soto, Jesus Heurta, 2006, Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles Mises Institute (Excerpts: Chapter 8, pp.675-714)

6. Central banking

• Smith, Vera, 1990 [1936], The Rationale of Central Banking, Liberty Fund (Excerpts Chapter XII, pp.167-196)
• Hayek, Friedrich A., 1990, Denationalisation of Money – The Argument Refined, Institute of Economic Affairs, Hobart Paper Special, No. 70 (Excerpts: pp.23-28, 46-55, 130-131)
• Congdon, Tim, 2009, Central Banking in a Free Society, Institute of Economic Affairs, Hobart Paper No. 166 (Excerpts Chapter 1, pp.34-43; Chapter 8, pp.178-189)

7.    Proposals for Reform

• Salsman, Richard, 1990, Breaking the Banks, American Institute for Economic Research (Excerpts: Chapter IX, pp. 125-141)
• De Soto, Jesus Heurta, 2006, Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles Mises Institute (Excerpts: Chapter 9, pp.736-787)
• De Soto, Jesus Heurta, 2006, Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles Mises Institute (Excerpts: Chapter 9, pp.788-805)

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:

• Snowden, Vane & Wynarczyk (1994) A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics, Edward Elgar

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

• Woodford, Michael (1999) “Revolution and Evolution in Twentieth-Century Macroeconomics”, Working Paper
• Krugman, Paul (2000) “How Complicated Does the Model Have to Be?” Oxford Review of Economic Policy Vol. 16 No.4
• Mankiw, N. Gregory (2006) “The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 20(4), pages 29-46, Fall.

Real Business Cycles

• Long, John B. and Plosser, Charles. (1983) “Real Business Cycles,” Journal of Political Economy, 39-69.
• “The Prescott-Summers debate” (1986) Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review Vol. 10, No. 4
• Stadler, George. (1994) “Real Business Cycles,” Journal of Economic Literature, XXXII, 1750-1783.

New Keynesian economics

• Clower, R., and Leijonhufvud, A., (1975) “The Coordination of Economic Activities: A Keynesian Perspective,” American Economic Review 65(2):182-188
• “Symposium: Keynesian Economics Today,” (1993) Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7(1):3-82*
• Mortensen, Dale and Pissarides, Christopher. (1994) “Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment,” Review of Economics Studies
• Taylor, John. (2000) “Reassessing Discretionary Fiscal Policy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21-36.

Monetary policy

• Caplin, Andrew and Spulber, Daniel. (1987) “Menu Costs and the Neutrality of Money,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 703-725
• Taylor, John B. (1993) “Discretion Versus Policy Rules in Practice,” Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 39, pp. 195-214
• “Symposium on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism,” (1995) Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9(4): 3-96*
• Shafir, Eldar, Diamond, Peter, and Tversky, Amos. (1997) “Money Illusion,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 341-374

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.

• David Romer (2011) Advanced Macroeconomics, McGraw Hill, 4th edition

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

This article intends to walk through a process for collecting and presenting data. It will include some basic commands in Excel and Powerpoint. The slide deck below provides a step-by-step guide. You should follow it in order to complete the set tasks.

You will need the following to get started:

• Download “aje_template.potx“
• You can download handouts for these slides here: “aje_data.pdf“

Tasks

1. Replicate the following PDF file (but without the patterned fill): “aje_data_chart.pdf”

• Kaleidic Guide to Using the UK National Accounts
• Find the NGDP figures from the ONS website (here’s a stable link for our data)
• Email me for the solution: “aje_data_1.xlsx”

2. Replicate the following PNG image (but without the patterned fill):

• Download “aje_data_2.xlsx“
• Email me for the solution: “aje_data_3.xlsx”

Resources on data visualisation:

• Not all graphs are straight lines by me
• Schwabish, J., 2014, “An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(1):209-234
• Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz by Rosamund Pearce
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus Wilke
• BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics
• Data visualisation white paper by SAS – this is very thorough
• Graphics Principles Cheat Sheet
• ChartPorn.org
• Modern approaches to data visualisation
• Chart format guide (by Paul Bolton), House of Commons Library Standard Note, October 15th 2014
• How to improve your tables – less is more
• Mistakes, we’ve made a few

Some examples of good data visualisation:

• The fallen of WW2
• Think before you use a donut chart 
• 2016 Internet Trends, by Mary Meeker, KPCB
• This tweet by Brian Reyes

The Economist is renowned for good data visualisations. Here is their advert for data journalists, demonstrating their expertise.

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This is part of my online course on Analytics.