In this course we will study the economy as a whole—that is, the macroeconomy. First we will study its behavior in the long run, considering questions such as why some economies grow while others stagnate, and how financial markets sustain economic growth. Second we will study the macroeconomy in the short run, considering questions such as why there is unemployment, why there are recessions, and how/if governments can mitigate them. Third, we will study the international economy, considering questions such as who benefits from international trade and how cross-country investment ties the world together. 

This course provides an introduction to programming in Python. It emphasizes commands and workflow useful for data science, especially in economics and other social sciences. These data science applications will be interwoven with lessons about basic syntax. Topics of study include variables and operations, containers, Pandas dataframes, conditional statements and conditional slicing of dataframes, loops, advanced string processing, file input/output, functions, and data visualization. This course will place less emphasis on object-oriented programming and more emphasis on practical data science applications. 

This course will help you learn to apply theory effectively in your research.  I want you to understand how to build a good model, how to test a model, and how to “take a model seriously” (a euphemism for structural estimation).  We will demonstrate each stage, with a heavy emphasis on the last step, by pursuing several extended examples. The emphasis is less on the specific topics than on how, given a topic, we can apply these three skills to build, test, and estimate a model. It is better to give you a comprehensive treatment of a few topics where we can follow a path of inquiry from the precursor models it builds on, through the new models proposed to replace them, and on to the empirical work needed to estimate the model. Given that fact, I choose this quarter to focus heavily on my own recent work. I will give you the behind-the-scenes motivation behind these projects and the granular steps required to complete it.

The ultimate goal of applied theory is to understand how the world would look if some aspect of reality were different. It is the most difficult area of economic research because it requires every skill you have already learned, and several more that we will cover in this class. It is also the most rewarding because it offers traction on some of the deepest and hardest questions in the field. Though I leverage these methods against the puzzle of macroeconomic (under)development, they are the same methods used in other fields.