Georgetown University

(SPRING 2017 -- Professor Moalla-Fetini)
At a time when mainstream Macroeconomics is in a state of flux having been seriously challenged by its failure to predict the 2008 financial crisis, this course invites you to shift away your attention from ready-made answers and to focus instead on deepening your understanding of the questions themselves and on thinking anew and by yourselves about those enduring fundamental questions of macroeconomics, namely what determines the overall level of activity in an economy, is it demand in the short run and supply in the long run and are price adjustments the bridge between the two; is an economy always able to create enough jobs to employ all those who are looking for one; is the level of the interest rate set in the money market in the short run, and anchored in some notion of productivity of capital in the long run; is the dichotomy between the short run and the long run a useful conceptual framework, why do economies experience booms and busts, inflation and deflation; are nominal variables ever divorced from their real counterparts; what specific role does the nexus time, uncertainty, and money play in today’s modern monetary economies; and is there anything governments can do to improve the performance of the economy, if a social consensus is reached about the performance criteria themselves. Prerequisites:  PPOL 501 & PPOL 502 & PPOL 506 or PPOL 531 & PPOL 532 & PPOL 536.