ECON 506 Macroeconomic Theory II

This is graduate-level macro built around the stochastic dynamic equilibrium paradigm that has dominated the field since the 1980s, asking how to model an economy where forward-looking agents respond rationally to shocks and where policy effects depend on the structural mechanism propagating them. You spend the semester working through Real Business Cycle and New Keynesian setups, learning to solve stochastic difference equations and estimate the resulting structural models on actual data via quizzes, a substantial homework stream, and exams. It sits on top of the first-semester macro core and the econometrics sequence, and it's the toolkit you need before doing serious empirical macro research or central-bank-style policy work.