Macro-Economics

• Coursera:Country Level Economics: Macroeconomic Variables and Markets   &  Country Level Economics: Policies, Institutions, and Macroeconomic Performance
• Illinois Catalog BADM 529: MACROECONOMICS FOR BUSINESS
• Offered in Summer Term (May-Aug)

This course is part of the Business Tools for Successful Execution.

Course Description

This course discusses how macroeconomic variables affect individuals’ personal, professional, and public activities and lays the foundation for the analysis of the mechanisms that drive macroeconomic variables.

Instructor

Coursera Profile

Course Goals and Objectives

• Demonstrate a basic understanding of the macroeconomic system and interpretation of key macroeconomic indicators.
• Understand how the exchange rate is determined and how it interacts with domestic and foreign prices to determine the competitiveness of an economy’s producers.
• Analyze the market for money and understand how the interest rate is determined.
• Understand how GDP level and inflation rate are determined in an economy and how macroeconomic factors and monetary and fiscal policies shape them.
• Analyze the key factors that account for the large differences in per capita incomes across countries.
• Identify the characteristics of socially desirable macroeconomic policies and understand why actual policies may deviate from them.
• Assess a country’s macroeconomic prospects based on the characteristics of its resources, technology, and policy making environment.

Topics of this course

• Module 1: Key Macroeconomic Indicators and Their Measurement
• Module 2: GDP Components, Twin Deficits, and Balance of Payments
• Module 3: The Foreign Exchange Market
• Module 4: Money, Interest Rate, and the Exchange Rate
• Module 5: Aggregate Expenditure and GDP in the Short Run When Prices are “Sticky”
• Module 6: Expectations and the Long Run Exchange Rate
• Module 7: Long-Run Economic Performance and Short-Run Adjustments
• Module 8: Institutions and Macroeconomic Policies

Course Materials

There is no required textbook for this course. Readings from background notes developed by me will be available as PDFs in each Module.

If you would like to purchase a book for additional reading, I suggest the following. I will list specific sections from these books in each Module, but you do not need to purchase or read them to successfully complete the course.

• Paul R. Krugman, Maurice Obstfeld, and Marc J. Melitz, International Economics: Theory and Policy, 10th ed., Addison Wesley, 2014.
• Gregory Mankiw, Macroeconomics, 9th Edition, Worth Publishers, 2016

Live Session Schedule (Tentative)

May 31st, 2017 – July 25th, 2017

Course Elements

• Video-lessons
• Practice and graded quizzes
• Assignments
• Requirements for grading assignments submitted by peers