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Macroeconomics

Yale has a long and storied tradition of excellence in macroeconomics and is currently one of the most vibrant macro research groups in the world. It includes faculty leading the field in both theory and empirical research as well as several faculty influencing current policy debates. It consistently trains and places macroeconominists in leading universities and policy institutions around the world.

Overview of Courses

The graduate macro sequence consists of the two core courses (510 and 511) and two advanced courses (525 and 526). The core courses analyze short-run determination of aggregate employment, income, investment, saving, prices, interest rates, asset prices, as well as growth, fiscal and monetary policy. To this purpose, core courses extensively train students in the methodology of modern dynamic economics: Dynamic Programming, Vector Autoregressions, Equilibrium concepts, computational methods. The advanced courses are topical and track frontier research in macroeconomics. Prominent examples of recently covered topics are heterogeneous agent economics with adjustment costs to capital and labor, wealth inequality in incomplete market economies with financial market imperfections, optimal taxation, search theory of unemployment.

Seminars

We have a weekly Macroeconomics Workshop at which faculty from other universities and advanced graduate students make presentations. The department also sponsors a weekly Macro Lunch where Yale faculty and graduate students present work in early stages.