Course description
The course discusses different aspects of macroeconomic policy decision-making. The students will learn how macroeconomic policy is grounded in society’s demands, and why it is important to find out these demands in the best possible way. The students will discuss the problems that are encountered in different ways to aggregate individual preferences and will understand the substance of Arrow’s impossibility theorem as well as problematic issues of various voting systems. The students will discuss ‘government failures’ and their influence on economic policy decision-making, and how they might be taken into account when making actual policy decisions. The students will also recall main macroeconomic models and their policy prescriptions for different situations, and discuss how financial and economic crises reveal new problems. Finally, the students are expected to analyse macroeconomic policy of a chosen country during the course.
Literature
- Benassy-Quere A., Coeure B., Jacquet P., Pisany-Ferry J. Economic Policy: Theory and Practice. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Carlin W., Soskice D. Macroeconomics. Imperfections, Institutions, and Policies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Heijdra B., van der Ploeg F. Foundations of Modern Macroeconomics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Sorensen P. B., Whitta-Jacobsen H. J. Introducing Advanced Macroeconomics: Growth and Business Cycles. London; Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005.