The Macro Pedagogy Debate: Teaching DSGE to Undergraduates Symposium

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Notes

1. A version of the author's half-joke to his/her students that “those who used the Williamson book will enjoy an advantage … but only for the first week of class” (this issue, p. 228) likely applies to graduate macro work, too.

2. Note that this does not rule out Farmer-esque (1999) multiplicity of equilibria at any moment in time. Even though there is jumping over time between these equilibria, there is still a single realized equilibrium at any given moment in time.

3. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20171101a.htm

4. A more full-throated, and more polarizing, defense of the traditional way of teaching undergraduate macro comes from Krugman (2018, p. 157), who argues that “macroeconomics hasn't changed that much because it was, in two senses, what my father's generation used to call ‘good enough for government work’ …. the basic models used by macroeconomists who either practise or comment frequently on policy have actually worked quite well, indeed remarkably well.”

5. Prominent examples include Jones (2017) and Blanchard (2017).

6. (1) Li, H. 2016. Financial sophistication, insurer default risk and the annuity puzzle. Wellesley Honors Thesis Collection, Economics Department; (2) Ashman, H. 2016. Modeling the racial wealth gap. Wellesley Honors Thesis Collection, Economics Department.