The book gives an insider's perspective on how policy economists do their jobs. It is intended for academics and students who want to make their economic research more relevant for policy, or for anyone who wants an overview of some of the important unanswered questions in macroeconomics.

Understanding macroeconomic developments and policies in the twenty-first century is daunting: policy-makers face the combined challenges of supporting economic activity and employment, keeping inflation low and risks of financial crises at bay, and navigating the ever-tighter linkages of globalization. Many professionals face demands to evaluate the implications of developments and policies for their business, financial, or public policy decisions. Macroeconomics for Professionals provides a concise, rigorous, yet intuitive framework for assessing a country's macroeconomic outlook and policies. Drawing on years of experience at the International Monetary Fund, Leslie Lipschitz and Susan Schadler have created an operating manual for professional applied economists and all those required to evaluate economic analysis.

Macroeconomic policy is one of the most important policy domains, and the tools of macroeconomics are among the most valuable for policy makers. Yet there has been, up to now, a wide gulf between the level at which macroeconomics is taught at the undergraduate level and the level at which it is practiced. At the same time, doctoral-level textbooks are usually not targeted at a policy audience, making advanced macroeconomics less accessible to current and aspiring practitioners. This book, born out of the Masters course the authors taught for many years at the Harvard Kennedy School, fills this gap. It introduces the tools of dynamic optimization in the context of economic growth, and then applies them to a wide range of policy questions – ranging from pensions, consumption, investment and finance, to the most recent developments in fiscal and monetary policy. It does so with the requisite rigor, but also with a light touch, and an unyielding focus on their application to policy-making, as befits the authors’ own practical experience. Advanced Macroeconomics: An Easy Guide is bound to become a great resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and practitioners alike.

This book attempts to demystify time series econometrics so as to equip macroeconomic researchers focusing on Africa with solid but accessible foundation in applied time series techniques that can deal with challenges of developing economic models using African data.

One of the great challenges that many participants in foreign exchange (FX) markets face is sifting through the often overwhelming amount of information that is available. Media outlets stream updates on international politics, economics, and other factors that move FX prices twenty-four hours a day. It is difficult to work out what is and what is not important. This book helps its reader overcome these challenges by combining the insights gained from a market practitioner who has traded FX at Goldman Sachs, PIMCO, and Barclays Investment Bank, with textbook-level modern financial macroeconomic theory. The book covers macroeconomics relating to exchange rate determination. While you could obtain this information from a disparate set of sources―textbooks, academic literature, industry research notes, conversations with other market practitioners, and theories cited in media reports―this book brings all of these sources together to translate the information into concrete FX views that are firmly rooted in the macroeconomic theory of risk premiums, interest rates, and inflation, among other topics. The book promotes time consistent thought that avoids the daily temptation to jump from that day’s economic narrative to the next. Of particular interest to buy- and sell-side industry practitioners, finance and economics graduate students, academics, and others interested in FX markets, this book teaches its readers how to do this and improve their own trading and understanding of the FX markets.

This book offers a practical guide to Agent Based economic modeling, adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze Agent Based models. After providing them with a basic “toolkit” for Agent Based modeling, it present and discusses didactic models of real financial and economic systems in detail. While stressing the main features and advantages of the bottom-up perspective inherent to this approach, the book also highlights the logic and practical steps that characterize the model building procedure. A detailed description of the underlying codes, developed using R and C, is also provided. In addition, each didactic model is accompanied by exercises and applications designed to promote active learning on the part of the reader. Following the same approach, the book also presents several complementary tools required for the analysis and validation of the models, such as sensitivity experiments, calibration exercises, economic network and statistical distributions analysis. By the end of the book, the reader will have gained a deeper understanding of the Agent Based methodology and be prepared to use the fundamental techniques required to start developing their own economic models. Accordingly, “Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents” will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academic institutions and lecturers interested in including an overview of the AB approach to economic modeling in their courses.

The absolute and relative performance of various asset classes is systematically related to macroeconomic trends. In this new book, Robert McGee provides a thorough guide to each stage of the business cycle and analyzes the investment implications using real-world examples linking economic dynamics to investment results.

An accessible description of modern macroeconomics, and a defense of its policy relevance. Macroeconomists have been caricatured either as credulous savants in love with the beauty of their mathematical models or as free-market fundamentalists who admit no doubt as to the market's wisdom. In this book, Kartik Athreya draws a truer picture, offering a nontechnical description of prominent ideas and models in macroeconomics, and arguing for their value as interpretive tools as well as their policy relevance. Athreya deliberately leaves out the technical machinery, providing an essential guide to the sometimes abstract ideas that drive macroeconomists' research and practical policy advice. Athreya describes the main approach to macroeconomic model construction, the foundational Walrasian general-equilibrium framework, and its modern version, the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie (ADM) model. In the heart of the book, Athreya shows how the Walrasian approach shapes and unifies much of modern macroeconomics. He details models central to ongoing macroeconomic analyses: the neoclassical and stochastic growth models, the standard incomplete-markets model, the overlapping-generations model, and the standard search model. Athreya's accessible primer traces the links between the views and policy advice of modern macroeconomists and their shared theoretical approach.

Modern Financial Macroeconomics takes a non-technical approach in examining the role that financial markets and institutions play in shaping outcomes in the modern macro economy. Reviews historical and contemporary macroeconomic theory Examines governmental influence on moderating (or exacerbating) economic fluctuations Discusses both empirical and theoretical links between financial systems and economic performance, as well as case studies detailing the role of finance in specific business cycle episodes