Description:
Lectures by Alexander Kriwoluzky (Part 1): Monetary & fiscal policy
In recent years, monetary and fiscal policy have been at the centre of most political debates. The 2019 pandemic prompted central banks to cut their interest rates quickly, drawing on the lessons of the Great Financial Crisis. At the same time, many governments launched huge stimulus packages, leaving many economies with high levels of public debt. In times of low interest rates, high public debt is of little concern to (fiscal) policymakers.
The invasion of Ukraine led to a surge in energy prices and thus inflation. Central banks responded by raising interest rates again to fight inflation. This action could have consequences for fiscal policy - and, as the course will show, for monetary policy as well.
In this course, we begin by discussing the reasons why monetary and fiscal policymakers have reacted as they have in recent years. To this end, we will identify monetary and fiscal policy shocks and discuss their effects and transmission in the economy. Finally, we will show how they are linked and how they interact.
Lectures by Alexander Monge-Naranjo (Part 2): Education, Labor Markets and Inequality
This course is divided into two parts. First, we cover a number of papers related to education choices, especially but not exclusively related to college decisions. Here, we explore additional aspects such as geographic differences, family background and pre-college family decisions, and demographic changes. We overview recent work on cross- and within-country differences in intergenerational mobility in education. Second, we cover a number of quantitative papers on how labor markets and the assignment and formation of workers’ human capital shape inequality. We review some mathematical tools (extreme value distributions) that allow for clean analytical solutions for individual decisions and their aggregation. Then, we analyze a number of papers that use Roy static models to quantitatively explore inequality and the contribution of human capital to aggregate income. Next, we explore a number of more recent –and still ongoing—research that extends those models to dynamic settings and explore the life-cycle dynamics of workers.
See syllabus for further information.
Literature:
See syllabus
Time & venue:
Wednesdays, 8:30-12:00; April 16, 30 - June 4: DIW Berlin, Mohrenstr. 58, Karl-Popper Room, June 16 - 26: FU Berlin
Evaluation:
Each part will be evaluated separately. Students need to pass both parts of the class.
