Description:
The key objective of this course is to equip students with state-of-the-art empirical macroeconomic tools to identify and estimate the causal macroeconomic effects of policy interventions ranging from monetary and fiscal policy to carbon pricing policies and climate change. These methods are most often one of the key ingredients in many academic studies and are also highly valued and frequently applied by public institutions, such as central banks or ministries. As a strong emphasis is placed on teaching students to actually implement and use these methods in their future work, there will be hands-on exercise sessions throughout the course. In these sessions, students will learn to use statistical software to apply the tools they learned in the lecture to estimate the macroeconomic effects of increases in global temperature, surges in energy prices, and rising interest rates. Upon completion of this course, students will not only be able to write a master's thesis in empirical macroeconomics but also gain one of the skills necessary to conduct macroeconomic analysis in a public institution.
Structure of the class: 90 min lecture + weekly exercise session
Topics and methods to be covered: Identification in macroeconomics, local projections, structural VAR analysis, instrumental variable methods, historical decompositions, forecast error variance decomposition, monetary policy, fiscal policy, climate change, energy price shocks.
Literature:
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Time & venue:
Lectures: Mondays, 12:00-14:00 (from October 20, 2025); HU Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, room 21A
Exercise session: Fridays, 12:00-14:00 (from October 17, 2025); HU Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, room 21B
Exam:
Portfolio: The students are required to form a group of 2-3 Students and choose a paper from the reading list. They are tasked with replicating the key results of the paper and presenting the study and their results to the class. In the term paper, they are supposed to write a short summary of the economic content of the paper, discuss the applied empirical approach and its potential shortcomings, as well as marginally changing the economic specification used in the paper to check for the robustness of the results. The presentation will account for 30% of the overall grade, whereas the term paper will account for the remaining 70%.
Requirements/assignment for PhD students:
PhD Students are also asked to apply one of the methods learned in class to a research question of their choice. They should summarize their first results in an additional research paper (5 pages maximum). The paper should consist of an introduction and motivation section followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of the methods applied. Lastly the paper should feature a discussion of the results from an economic and/or econometric point of view.
Ben Schumann
