Teaching Material for Macroeconomic Courses

Complete teaching material for a semester-long course in Intermediate Macro and a week-long course in Math for Macro.

This post is for anyone who is teaching Intermediate Macroeconomics or Mathematical Methods for Macroeconomics for the first time this summer or this fall, and who is looking for course templates or for inspiration for specific parts.

I have taught these courses in the past at the London School of Economics and at Brown University. I have now uploaded on GitHub the source files producing the complete teaching material for the courses.

Intermediate Macroeconomics

The source files for the teaching material are available at https://github.com/pmichaillat/intermediate-macro.

The material is designed for a semester-long course in Intermediate Macroeconomics. The course covers six topics:

• Macroeconomic concepts

• IS-LM model of business cycles

• Matching model of unemployment

• Models of inflation

• Malthusian model of growth

• Solowian model of growth

The teaching material includes the following:

• 30 slide decks for 30 one-hour lectures

• 5 problem sets, each composed of a number of problems (roughly one problem set per topic)

• 6 quizzes, each composed of many multiple-choice questions (one quiz per topic)

The quizzes can be assigned as homework after lecture, can be posted on Canvas for pre-lecture warm-up, or can be used for active learning during lecture.

The course page also includes readings to complement the slides (roughly two readings per topic). The readings can be assigned as homework, or just provided for reference.

I found that printing the slides and handing them out at the beginning of lecture was extremely effective. It discouraged students from pulling out their laptops, since there was no room for a laptop and the slides on the lecture hall’s small tables. It also encouraged them to take notes directly on the slides.

Mathematical Methods for Macroeconomics

The source files for the teaching material are available at https://github.com/pmichaillat/math-for-macro.

The material is designed for a week-long course in Mathematical Methods for Macroeconomics. The course covers three topics:

• Dynamic programming

• Optimal control

• Differential equations

The teaching material includes the following:

• 3 sets of lecture notes (one per topic)

• 3 problem sets (one per topic)

• 1 cumulative problem set covering all three topics

Textbook

These courses do not require a textbook: they are completely self-standing.

License

The source files are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This means that they are open access: they can be freely shared or adapted in any way. The only condition is to provide proper attribution—mostly provide the name of the creator, provide a link to the material, include a license notice, and indicate if changes were made.