Syllabus for 712, 2021, Jose Víctor Ríos Rull 
Topics in Quantitative Macroeconomics: Labor, Health & Family
Course Description
- This course should be thought of as a Macro/Labor course that should be of interest to people that care about both areas. Its main purpose is to link models and data i.e. to answer quantitative questions that we are interested in (in the process of doing so, some interesting theoretical questions arise). We will develop tools by stating general questions, and then discussing how to approach its answer.
- It is also driven by students' interests so the content will vary depending on what you care about. Now is the time to raise your concerns.
- This is a Ph.D. course not a Masters course. We are not here to learn about existing work but to learn about how to do work, and, therefore, it requires to do some things.
- Format. Classes will be a combination of students presentations and lectures. The topic is the student's choice as long as it has to do somewhat with a question with an applied angle that aggregates.
- This course is tightly related to Dirk Krueger's simultaneous course. I expect that you are able to pose and solve models of the Imrohoroglu/Aiyagari/Huggett family including transitions.
Grading Rules and Registration
- Registered students should present once, answer a homework and write a two page proposal. The homework will be writing code to replicate results or answer a question or something like that. I will propose various during the course. The proposal should describe a clear task associated to a question. While the proposal is not actual paper it should describe the set of tasks. If computational it should include a version of working code. Students then talk to me about what they want to do. I expect that you should be able to do all things that I propose. The homework is due April 28, 2021 at NOON in my mailbox.
- For those that do not register but take the course, I recommend that, at least,1 you also present and do a homework.
Course Plan
We start talking about a general household life cycle model of the Aiyagari type and set in there some of the main ingredients of the course.
I will ask about unobserved heterogeneneity
Possible papers to present are
- Job stability, earnings dynamics, and life-cycle savings (Kuhn and Plog 2020)
- Sources of Lifetime Inequality (Huggett, Ventura and Yaron 2011),
- Dynamics of Deterrence (Guler and Michaud 2020) Extended Appendix
- Lise Restud
But you are free to present whatever you want.
Possible Topics that are related to my work and we can talk about are
- Health Consumption and Inequality (how to estimate what health is)
- Banking Dynamics and Capital Regulation (Hopenhayn banks in general equilibrium )
- Organizational Equilibrium (What is a good theory of policy)
- The Generalized Euler Equation and the Bankruptcy–Sovereign Default Problem (How to characterize default Problems)
- A Theory of Credit Scoring and Competitive Pricing of Default Risk (how to think of types: another role for extreme value shocks)
- Life Insurance and Household Consumption (How to use choices to measure certain other things)
- Sticky Wages and Slavery in New Keynesian Models (how to avoid the problem that agents or firms can work against their will)
- Directed Search, Nominal Rigidities and Markup Cyclicality (How to get New Keynesian models to have procyclical markups)
- Living Arrangements and Labor market Volatility of Young workers (a model of cyclical movements on the number of households)
- A Theory of Low Interest Rates and Low Investment (how come despite low real interest rates there is no surge in investment)
- What can we learn from Seasonality (is there something in the seasonal patterns that tells us what are the sources of shocks?)
Other Topics to discuss (not necessarily related to my work)
- Human Capital Investment models. This topic will involve a problem with two dimensional endogenous assets and investment. All should do (or be able to do) this. This problem should be posed recursively. I also ask for some people to look at how to solve the problem with two dimensions, assets and a continuous shock, and to propose innovative ways of solving it. A possible place to start is here.