I plan on walking over to Shapiro after class—you are all welcome to join.
The goal of this section is to help you earn a good grade in ECON 402. A large part of ECON 402’s raison d’êtr is teaching you actual economics, so I’ll also try to incorporate a few topics (mostly nifty stuff you can do with computers) that will likely form the basis of your future research and/or what will come up in job interviews. But those topics will just be for fun.
I encourage you to attend all sections and office hours. Please speak up if a topic needs more consideration. And please laugh at all my jokes.
While the class is largely self-contained, Professor House mentioned that he may at times reference material from ECON 401. Occasionally I may want to reference 401-type material or finance-related material. I will do so, mostly, by referring to notes that I wrote as a GSI for ECON 401 and 435. These notes are available here:
The past year and a half I was a GSI for the first-year macro sequence in the PhD program. Those notes are also cataloged there. We’ll be covering some of the same topics in this class, in case you’re interested in a more math-y presentation.
In the interests of full and forthright disclosure, I really really really like macroeconomics. Any economic evangelism is only meant in jest or to signal what I think is useful to know (like for exams). We’re going to learn a lot and have lots of fun this semester.
And because it seems like good policy to inflict the absolute minimum amount of pain on anyone, you will not be penalized if something comes up for you. E.g., you are in Chicago for a job interview on a given Friday. Please just notify me well in advance so we can work out a solution. N.B. this only applies to homeworks—I have no control over exams.↩