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Blog Posts About Classical Music
A loosely sorted and lightly annotated catalogue of through the music posts on this blog.
Macroeconomics Lecture Notes (Spring 2026) Catalogue
A loosely organized catalogue of macroeconomics lecture notes of Spring 2026 — neoclassical growth, structural transformation, misallocation, heterogeneous agents, and business cycles.
Zukerman Trio at the CSO | When the piano glitters
The amazing Pinchas Zukerman, Amanda Forsyth and Michael Stephen Brown brings a night of exquisite classic trios to the well-educated-but-enthusiastically-clapping-between-mvts Chicago audience on a cozy Saturday night. Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 1 Higdon Pale Yellow from Piano Trio Dvořák Dumky for Piano, Violin and Cello, Op. 90 The music moved me. And the program is nice — just pure beauty, elegance and joy, no need for an avant garde piece to prove anything this time. ...
Benjamin Grosvenor at the CSO | What do composers speak musically and what do we hear
Benjamin Grosvenor hit the CSO Sunday 3pm stage with a program that speaks different musical languages: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Schumann’s Fantasy in C Major (Op. 17), Scriabin’s Sonata No 2 (Op. 19) and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Benjamin Grosvenor plays Ravel really well. I hear the poetic vibe and surreal magic. Though you don’t need a PhD in music to appreciate the beauty of Moonlight Sonata, and despite the program are all popular composer’s signature work — with a bit of learning, one can you hear the difference of how composers speak through music, especially with the contrasting program. ...
Timothée Chalamet 'No one cares about ballet or opera'
A bee does not waste its energy trying to convince a fly that honey is better than shit. During award season, the movie star Tim Cha commented on ballet and opera that it’s “barely alive” and “no one cares about it anymore”. He made a big point, and got blackslashed by all major opera houses. The Seattle opera even released a TIMOTHEE discount code for 14% off. It’s interesting to debate the future of the classical art industry, but certainly not during award season. ...
Mäkelä Conducts CSO for The Rite of Spring
The CSO curates program with glittering wisdom. A while ago back in November, Robert Chen led the strings to present Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the winter was shapr and cold. And now, our new artistic director led an adorable (and impressive) program welcoming spring: Milhaud Le Bœuf sur le toit Gershwin An American in Paris Stravinsky The Rite of Spring Klaus Mäkelä conducted CSO March 5, 2026. Two nearly sold out nights. The concert program is nice and covers stories about the music: https://issuu.com/chicagosymphony/docs/program_book_-_m_kel_conducts_the_rite_of_spring ...
Macro Lecture Notes | Balanced Growth Path with Risk and Distortions
Motivation In the standard neoclassical model, three return measures coincide: $$ R^{rf} = \mathbb{E}R^k_{t+1} = MPK. $$ This is a strong and testable prediction. Empirically, all three diverge and move differently over time. The question is: what drives the wedges? The answer: risk drives a wedge between $R^{rf}$ and $\mathbb{E}R^k$; markups drive a wedge between $\mathbb{E}R^k$ and $MPK$. Model A representative household with CRRA preferences $\mathbb{E}_0\sum_t \beta^t \frac{C_t^{1-\sigma}}{1-\sigma}$, inelastic labor supply $\bar N$. ...
Macro Lecture Note | Stochastic Economies and Basic Asset Pricing
Motivation We want a unified framework to answer two questions in a stochastic economy: How do agents price any asset (bonds, stocks, firms)? What objective function should a firm maximize? The key insight: under complete markets, Arrow-Debreu prices pin down a unique stochastic discount factor (SDF), which prices every asset via a single formula. In a representative-agent economy, completeness imposes no additional restrictions on allocations (zero net supply clears trivially), but it gives us clean pricing machinery. ...
Macro Lecture Notes | The Real-Business-Cycle (RBC) Model
Finally! Let’s talk about shocks. Motivation U.S. per capita real GDP (in logs) exhibits a clear upward trend over the 20th century. The neoclassical growth model explains this trend well. However, GDP also fluctuates around this trend. The question is: can the same neoclassical framework, driven solely by productivity shocks, also explain these cyclical fluctuations? To isolate cycles, we decompose log GDP into a trend component (extracted via the Hodgkin–Prescott filter or a band-pass filter) and a cyclical component (the residual). The cyclical component reveals the following stylized facts from U.S. quarterly data (1947–1995, HP-filtered): ...
Macro Lecture Notes | Total Production Networks, plus Distortions
Lecture 9 measures misallocation but under a simple market structure (intermediate firms -> final firms -> production). Baqaee and Farhi (2020) extended the analysis to arbitrary production network. With general CRS technology assumption, one can decompose GDP growth into contributions from technology, factor accumulation, and misallocation—all using observable data. Environment Primitives There are three classes of agents: $N$ producers (firms), indexed $i = 1, \dots, N$. $F$ primary factors, indexed $f = 1, \dots, F$, supplied inelastically in quantities $\bar{L}_f > 0$ (exogenous). A representative consumer and a final good sector. The exogenous objects are: productivities $\{A_i\}_{i=1}^N$, factor endowments $\{\bar{L}_f\}_{f=1}^F$, and functional forms $\{F_i\}_{i=1}^N$, $\mathcal{D}$. ...