University of California at Berkeley
Fall Semester, 2005

Economics 100B -- Macroeconomic Analysis

 

Professor: Charles I. Jones (chad@econ, 3-1564). Office Hours: Mondays 2-3pm and Tuesdays 1:15-2:15pm, 609 Evans
GSI Information: Follow this link for email addresses, office hours, etc.

For questions about the final exam, please see here. Note well: I've changed the date of my office hours to Monday, January 23 since January 16 is a university holiday.

Announcements:

Final Exam: Practice exam | Some solutions | Review Questions.

Second Midterm: Exam | Solutions | Regrade policy | Review | Hannah Midterm2 Distribution

First Midterm: Exam | Solutions (revised) | Regrade policy | Review

Problem Sets: [PS1] | [PS2] | [PS3] | [PS4] | [PS5] | [PS6] | [PS7] | [PS8] | [PS9] | [PS10] | [PS11] | [PS12]

Solutions: To view solutions to the problem sets, you will need a Blackboard account. Follow the instructions here (see "Course Documents" once you've signed up for the class).

Problem Set 4 (due on Sept 26/27) includes a completely optional computer exercise. If you decide to play with it, here is the SolowModel.xls file.

Overview

This course develops the tools you need to understand economic outcomes at the level of the nation instead of at the level of the firm or industry. It uses these tools to study basic issues in macroeconomics, including growth, technological change, income inequality, interest rates, inflation, wages, unemployment, government debt and deficits, international trade, and exchange rates. The course places a heavy emphasis on problem solving, economic analysis, and data analysis.

Administration

Administrative Information: This link contains information on exam policies, exam dates, problem set policies, etc. You are responsible for knowing all of this information. Here is the promised description of how I will compute your overall course grade.

Textbook

I am preparing notes for Econ 100b that will be used in place of a textbook. The course reader containing these notes is required, and it can now be purchased at Copy Central (2560 Bancroft) for about seventeen dollars. No other books are required. Additional notes may be made available as the course progresses.

Computer Spreadsheets

No matter what you do after college, chances are excellent that you will at least occasionally need to analyze some data using a spreadsheet. This course will give you some practice along these lines. In particular, some of the problem sets will require you to use a computer spreadsheet program like Excel or the "Calc" program of OpenOffice. You can use any spreadsheet program you like. The OpenOffice program is available free of charge here. You should use the tutorial programs that come with your spreadsheet so that you understand how to perform basic calculations and make simple graphs. We will assume you have this knowledge. The first problem set has an exercise along these lines.

Key Dates

Thursday, October 6: First midterm (in class)
Thursday, November 10: Second midterm (in class)
Tuesday, December 20: Final exam -- 12:30pm-3:30pm in Wheeler Auditorium

Syllabus

We will proceed sequentially through the notes that are distributed. The number of lectures I anticipate allotting to each chapter are listed in parentheses below.

INTRODUCTION (2 lectures)
Chapter 1: Introduction (1)
Chapter 2: Measuring the Macroeconomy (1)
THE LONG RUN (11 lectures)
Chapter 3: Overview of the Long Run (1)
Chapter 4: A Model of Production (2)
Chapter 5: The Solow Model (2)
Chapter 6: Growth and Ideas (3)
Chapter 7: The Labor Market (1.5)
Chapter 8: Inflation (1.5)
THE SHORT RUN (7 lectures)
Chapter 9: Overview (1)
Chapter 10: The IS Curve (2)
Chapter 11: Monetary Policy and the Phillips Curve (2)
Chapter 12: The Full Short-Run Model (2)
TOPICS (6 lectures)
Chapter 13: The Government Budget Constraint (2)
Chapter 14: International Trade (2)
Chapter 15: Exchange Rates and the Open Economy (2)
CONCLUSION (1 lecture)
Chapter 16: Conclusion (1)

 

Some useful links: