Department of Economics

Harris Dellas / Fabrice Collard

Seminar:  Macroeconomics and International Economics - Spring Semester 2015

General Information

ECTS: 6
KSL-Nr: 103492
Teaching Language: English

Outline

Please check this page regurarly for changes, updates and notifications!

The aim of this seminar is to provide students with a rigorous survey of the traditional real business cycle literature, focussing both on monetary and fiscal issues, as well as open economy and labor market questions. The seminar in macroeconomics and international economics is a very demanding course of the MSc in Economics at University of Bern, as it requires both theoretical and practical work.
The students select one paper out of a broad list of influential papers in macroeconomics and are asked to read and understand the paper, solve the model therein and replicate the main findings with Dynare, an extension to Matlab for simulating Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) Models.

Teaching Assistant

Philipp Wegmüller
Office A330 or PC-Lab
philipp.wegmueller@vwi.unibe.ch

Office hours: Mondays 14:00-16:00
(announce questions by mail)

NEWS

14.04.2015

• The handout for PC-Lab Session 3 is now available.

01.04.2015

• Solutions for the 2nd PC-Lab session are now available.
• The second Micro-Article is due latest 10.04.2015, midnight.

31.03.2015

• The handout for PC-Lab Session 2 is now available.
  

25.03.2015

• The following list of reading is related to RBC- models, their derivation and applications. All the books are available in our library.
  
• McCandless, George. "The ABCs of RBCs." Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard, 2008.
• Thomas F. Cooley, ed. Frontiers of business cycle research. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Canova, Fabio. Methods for applied macroeconomic research. Vol. 13. Princeton University Press, 2007.
• DeJong, D. N., and C. Dave. Structural macroeconomics, 2007.
• Helpful lecture notes from Prof. Collard are available here.
  

20.03.2015

• Solutions to the 2nd PC-Lab session are now available.
  

16.03.2015

• Handout and slides for the second PC-Lab session of Tuesday 17.03.2015 are available.
• The first Micro-Article is due 22.03.2015, midnight.
  

04.03.2015

• Solutions to the Dynare Introduction are now available.

02.03.2015

• Slides and Handout for Dynare-Session are now available!
• Checkout the template for the Micro-Artciles and an example.

20.02.2015

• Use http://bit.ly/1J0wyCY to sign up and select a paper till Friday, February 27.

• As an introduction to the Real Business Cycle theory, we recommend you to read
  Real Business Cycle Models: Past, Present and Future by Sergio Rebelo
  

• Since most of the participants have a basic knowledge on working with Matlab, there will not be an extra introduction to Matlab.
  
• Here you can find a Matlab Guide with some general instructions.
  
• If you are not very familiar with the Matlab environment, please read through the Handout with exercises. The Solutions can be found here.

Seminar Schedule