Economics 214 - Topics in Applied Macroeconomics
Professor Valerie Ramey
Spring 2019

Syllabus

For Monday April 1:

Notes on Phillips Curve Illustration

For Monday April 1 - Monday April 8:

Estimating Causal Relationships in Macroeconomics
Stata program that runs regression, IV, and VAR
Excel data file used by Stata program
Understanding VAR estimation step-by-step
Jorda local projections for tax shocks
Data file used by varbp.do and jordatax.do

For Monday April 8 - Monday April 15:

Stata program that estimates fiscal systems
Data file used by fiscalvar.do

For Tuesday April 16 (make-up lecture for April 10):

Presentation on Dynare
Basic RBC Dynare Program
Government Purchases Dynare Program
We worked through the neoclassical theory of fiscal effects and modified the RBC model to include government spending.

For Wednesday April 17:

We discussed the New Keynesian approach to fiscal, covering part of Woodford (2011).

For Monday April 22:

We finished Woodford (2011).

For Wednesday April 24:

Lecture Notes on Gali, Lopez-Salido, Valles

For Monday April 29:

Explorations with fiscal dynare programs. Government Purchases Dynare Program

For Wednesday May 1, Wednesday May 8:

Presentation on "Estimating the Aggregate Effects of Government Spending: The Importance of Anticipations"
Presentation on Auerbach-Gorodnichenko state dependence
Presentation on Ramey-Zubairy state dependence

For Monday May 13 - Wednesday May 15:

Continue Ramey-Zubairy state dependence
Presentation on Miyamoto-Nguyen-Sergeyev ZLB in Japan
Summary of Cross-Sectional Government Spending Results
Presentation on Estimating the Effects of Taxes
Slides on empirical estimates of MPCs
Slides on micro vs. macro MPCs

For Monday May 20 - Wednesday May 22:

Slides on Kaplan and Violante
Kaplan-Violante model presented on the board.
Slides on micro vs. macro MPCs
Slides Comparing Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans with Smets-Wouters
Harald Uhlig Slides on Smets-Wouters.
We will do exercises using Harald Uhlig's Smets-Wouters toolkit.

Monday June 3:

We will talk about Smets-Wouters theory and some empirical monetary

Harald Uhlig Slides on Smets-Wouters.

Slides on empirical monetary shocks.

Excel file with monetary data

Stata file with monetary data

Stata .do file for monetary data

The following are edited Mertens-Ravn's programs:

Main proxy svar file for Matlab

1st auxillary Matlab file for psvar.m

2nd auxillary Matlab file for psvar.m

3rd auxillary Matlab file for psvar.m

Project 1

Project 1 (Due Thursday April 25th at 11:59 pm)
Data for Question #1 of Project 1

Project 2

Project 2 (Due Tuesday May 21 at 11:59 pm)