A loosely organized catalogue of macroeconomics lecture notes of Spring 2026 — neoclassical growth, structural transformation, misallocation, heterogeneous agents, and business cycles.
I. Neoclassical Growth — The Backbone
Where it all started.
- Constant Growth Path in Neoclassical Economic Model — the peculiar assumptions that make everything tractable
- Inequality in Neoclassical Growth Model with Capitalists and Workers under Balanced Growth — what the model says (and doesn’t say) about distribution
- Mean Reversion (a concept that’s been abusively used) — from the heterogeneous households class; Euler equation, IES, and when consumption actually mean-reverts
- Macro Lecture Notes | Balanced Growth Path with Risk and Distortions — what survives the BGP when you add shocks and wedges
II. Structural Transformation
As economies develop, they shift from agriculture to manufacturing to services — obviously. But explaining it precisely with a model that matches data is not triviallly easy:
- Supply Side Structural Change in Macroeconomics — the classic Baumol-style story: differential TFP growth across sectors
- Demand Side Driven Structural Change — non-homothetic preferences and income effects do a lot of work
- Does supply side or demand side structural change drive growth? — a paper that tries to decompose the two; discussed in class
- Trade and Structural Change — how openness reshapes sectoral composition
III. Misallocation — Why Some Economies Underperform
If the neoclassical model works, factors should flow to where they’re most productive. But sometimes they don’t. These notes are about the wedges, distortions, and market structures that cause misallocation — within sectors, across sectors, and across countries.
- Cross-Country Income Differences is Because of What? — the accounting exercise that started a literature
- Macro Lecture Notes | Wedge Accounting and Intersectoral Distortions — mapping distortions to their effects on aggregate TFP
- Monopolistic Competition in General Equilibrium — the Dixit-Stiglitz setup and what it buys you
- Macro Lecture Notes | Misallocation within sectors in monopolistic competition — firm-level distortions and their aggregate consequences
- Macro Lecture Notes | Total Production Networks, plus Distortions — when sectors are linked, a distortion anywhere is a distortion everywhere
IV. Randomness, Asset Pricing, and Beyong R(representative)ANK
The representative agent is a useful lie. When households differ — in wealth, income risk, liquidity constraints — the aggregate behavior of the economy changes in ways the representative agent model misses. These notes touches on the boundary of what representative agent model can capture and leads to the future
- Macro Lecture Notes | The Real-Business-Cycle (RBC) Model — the bridge from neoclassical growth to business cycle theory
- Macro Lecture Note | Stochastic Economies and Basic Asset Pricing — pricing risk in general equilibrium; Arrow-Debreu, no-arbitrage, and where it connects to finance
- Implicit vs Explicit Updates — numerical methods for solving steady states in heterogeneous agent models; more interesting than it sounds