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Material for a MA-PhD Course in Advanced Macroeconomics


On this page, you will find all the material of a class of Advanced Macro: Economic Growth. To start with, some lectures are necessary. The book of David Weil "Economic Growth" (3rd Edition) is a perfect manual. I also recommend strongly the slides offered by Daron Acemoglu, they are extremly precise, complete and easy to read. For my class, I especially recommend to read Lectures 4 to 11 in order to catch up with the basics of economic growth models. You can find them here: https://economics.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/courses

If you need to catch up rapidly with the basics of OLG models and simple endogenous growth models, you can be tempted to read the slides of Yulei Luo from HKU. These slides are in line with Acemoglu but the presentation is shorten: http://www.sef.hku.hk/~yluo/teaching/6012_2017/econ6012_2017.htm

On OLG models, you can also read the enlightening, more complete but more technical book of David de la Croix and Philippe Michel  "A Theory of Economic Growth : Dynamics and Policy in Overlapping Generations". Here are some of my slides (in French) summarizing some parts of the book.

The main idea of this course is that it is barely impossible to understand the history of economic growth without understanding the history of human populations. Economics has traditionally investigated topics and used methods coming from other disciplines. Here we will rely a lot on history, antrhopology and demography. Since the seminal contribution of Becker (1960), economists have developed a unified framework allowing to analyze family behaviors with the tools of microeconomy. This is the main topic of my first lecture: here are the slides.

It is then time to reconsider the history of economic growth and population dynamics at the light of the works of Oded Galor and David Weil who have identifed three main phases over time. I deliver here a reading of Galor and Weil's contribution using complementary information. A lot of the slides I use here have been originally built by David de la Croix. Here are the slides.

To understand how some populations have escaped from Malthusian stagnation while some others didn't, it is warmly recommended to read the famous book of Oded Galor "Unified Growth Theory". To present this theory, I use the slides of a lecture given by Oded Galor, they are here. These slides are complete and extremely well written.

A recent literature has developed around the idea that some necessary conditions have to be met before the main mechanism of the UGT can take place. This is the case for instance of the accumulation of upper tailed human capital: you can find the contribution of Mara Squarcini and Nico Voigtländer on this topic here. I will present here a recent contribution of Baudin and Stelter that shows how favorable geographical and migratory conditions have been necessary too: here.

In the recent years, a very active literature has emerged to measure the deep roots of economic growth and comparative development. In this respect, the contributions of Oded Galor are key again. I then present this contribution and its refinements here.

After this rapid tour of the frontier of knowledge about long run economic growth, I show how population dynamics and family behaviors are key for a series of other hot topics:

        * Economic crisis, economic booms and reproduction: paper.
        * Wars, conflicts and fertility: paper
        * Culture, economy and population:
                 - Becker and Stigler’s critics
                 - Measures of cultural transmission and preferences
                     transmission ->  paper
                  - Theories of cultural transmission and preferences
                        transmission: an application to gender differences in  
                        preferences -> paper

        * Childlessness and higher order parities: economic and demographic
             inequalities -> paper 1, paper 2

Final exam: MCQ on the lectures of the course and on your reading of 3 outstanding papers:

[1] Voigtländer, N., & Voth, H. J. (2012). The three horsemen of riches: Plague, war, and urbanization in early modern Europe. Review of Economic Studies, 80(2), 774-811.  LINK

[2] DE, DAVID, CROIX MATTHIAS DOEPKE, and JOEL MOKYR. "Vol. 133 February 2018 Issue." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 1 (2018): 70.  LINK

[3] Doepke, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2017). Parenting with style: Altruism and paternalism in intergenerational preference transmission. Econometrica, 85(5), 1331-1371.  LINK


MORE Slides: UGT and Human Evolution, Comparative development and the Out-of-Africa hypothesis, Rural Exodus.