Economics 281B - Topics in Empirical Macroeconomics
Professor Valerie Ramey
Winter 2014 - 2nd Half


Syllabus

For Wednesday March 12:

Graphs and Tables for Time Use Lecture

For Monday March 10:

Graphs and Tables for News Lecture

Project #3
Data for project

For Wednesday March 5:

Dynare Program with 3 Types of Taxes

From Monday March 3:

Slides with Graphs and Tables from Lecture on Anticipation Effects in Fiscal

Project #2
Matlab code for replicating Ramey-Zubairy
Matlab code for calculating Newey-West standard errors - used by main_us_annotated.m
Excel Data file accompanying Matlab Code
Stata code for estimating a basic Ramey-Zubairy model
CSV file for Stata program


For Wednesday February 26:

Lecture Notes on State Dependent Goverment Spending Multipliers

Project #1 Due Friday Feb. 28, 10 am.

(Note: Some students have had trouble getting the program to converge with capital taxes if z is calibrated to 0. My program works with z = 0.1, others have had success setting z = 1.)

For Wednesday February 19:

Please have Dynare loaded on your computer.
Data for Government Spending VARs
(Please make sure you have software that can run a basic VAR using a Choleski decomposition for identification.)


For Wednesday February 12:

JFV's Basic RBC Dynare Program

Data on productivity and hours in Business

If you already have a program that estimates models with long-run restrictions, please bring it to class.


Follow-up from class:

1. A nice demonstration of the Shapiro-Watson method for imposing long-run restrictions is available in Appendix A of Francis-Owyang-Theodorou-2003
2. A documented version of the Stata program I used to test for instrument relevance in a Gali-type SVAR is available here and the data are here
3. In class, I said that Dynare requires the capital stock to be defined to be the end of the period capital stock. There was a question about whether that is still true in the latest version of Dynare. It is still true for the default; however, one can now change the default. To read more about it, see the manual at page 14.

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For Monday February 10:

Notes on Uhlig-2012 "Economics and Reality"

The Perils of Identification in Macroeconomics - revised Feb. 12