This page contains links to interactive notebooks that I created for (beginning) graduate Macroeconomics course at the LSE (EC413), 2023-2024, with Matthias Doepke and Silvana Tenreyro as lecturers. My students found them extremely useful. Built using the Pluto and PlutoUI packages of Julia ecosystem, these are mainly meant to help students visualise the models and build intuition by enabling them to do comparative statics (and dynamics) simply by dragging a slider! No knowledge of Julia is required, but interested students can reveal the underlying code and use it as a basic intro to Julia and numerical methods in Macroeconomics.
Solow model in discrete time. BGP and the steady state. The Uzawa theorem. Transition paths. Convergence and Speed of convergence. Kaldor facts and the Solow model. Non-unitary elasticity of substitution between labour and capital (CES production function). CES production function and comparative statics. The Golden rule consumption.
Neoclassical Growth model. (Representative) Firm and Household problems. Characterization of the equilibrium. The Consumption Euler equation. Equilibrium, and welfare. Recursive formulation. Bellman equations for the original, and detrended problem. Solving the Bellman equation with Guess and Verify. The Value function iteration (VFI): intro to numerical methods. Transitional dynamics, saving rates, and elasticity of inter-temporal substitution.
England (1260-2016): population, living standards and industrialisation. Facts of economic stagnation. The Malthusian model of stagnation. Land in production and the fertility-income relation. Transition after negative population shock (the Plague), and positive land shock (the American Frontier).
Does the essentiality of food matter for take-off to the modern growth? A model with non-homothetic preferences. Subsistence level and possibility of Malthusian trap. The Malthusian disaster. Successful industrialisation in England.
Growth, technology and production of ``Ideas’’. The Economics of ideas. How are ideas produced? How to model the R&D. The Romer’s model with expanding (input) variety. The equilibrium and the endogenous growth. Pareto optimality and welfare theorems. Optimal growth path.
Growth and creative destruction. A quality ladder model of growth. The innovation technology. Innovation on the balanced growth path. Solving for the balanced growth rate in closed form.
