This graduate textbook is a primer in macroeconomics. It starts from essential undergraduate macroeconomics and develops the central topics of modern macroeconomic theory in a simple and rigorous manner. All topics essential for first year graduate students are covered. These include rational expectations, intertemporal dynamic models, exogenous and endogenous growth, nonclearing markets and imperfect competition, uncertainty, and money. The book also covers real business cycles and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, integrating growth and fluctuations, sticky wages and prices, consumption and investment, and unemployment. Lastly, it studies government policy, stabilization, credibility, and the connections between politics and the macroeconomy. Each topic is presented in the simplest model possible while still delivering the relevant answers and keeping rigorous foundations throughout the book. To make the book fully self-contained there is a mathematical appendix that gives all necessary mathematical results.
1 Growth
2 Output, Inflation and Stabilization
3 Rational Expectations
4 Intertemporal Equilibria with Optimizing Agents
5 Nonclearing Markets and Imperfect Competition
6 Uncertainty and Financial Assets
7 The Ramsey Model
8 Overlapping Generations
9 Endogenous Growth
10 Competitive Business Cycles
11 Money
12 Money and Cycles
13 Nominal Rigidities and Fluctuations
14 Consumption, Investment, Inventories and Credit
15 Unemployment: Basic Models
16 A Dynamic View of Unemployment
17 Policy: The Public Finance Approach
18 Stabilization policies
19 Dynamic Consistency and Credibility
20 Political Economy
A Mathematical Appendix
Jean-Pascal Bénassy graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Director of Research at National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Research Fellow at Center for Economic Research and its Applications (CEPREMAP).