UCL- Econ 081 Advanced Macroeconomics: Models with Heterogeneous Agents, 2020/2021
José Víctor Ríos Rull and Wei Cui

Please email me with any concerns. Office hours by appointment. vr0j@upenn.edu

This part of the course will be 15 hours and it will include the following times which include 18 hours. I place extra time in case there is some conflict. I will tell it in class and post it here.

This is a course with the aim of both opening a window into parts of modern quantitative macroeconomics and an invitation to join. We will discuss why heterogeneity is important and how to implement it. We then will look at a few tools to be able to use the Aiyagari model.

We will look then at various topics, such as what determines residual wage inequality, how to think of banking, household default, the use of credit scores, models with OLG, health as a crucial form of shocks. At so on.

The course is also going to be flexible, this is, I will respond to the larges possible extent to the interests of the participating students. The whole point is for attendants to get as much out of the hhcourse as possible.

Finally, throughout the course we will put special emphasis on discussing what is a research project, how we use models to answer quantitative questions and how to interpret the outcome of models.

The following is part of the material that I will use for teaching.

In the context of the course, I will ask for active student involvement. This means participation in discussion and a short presentation which can be of own ideas, a brief description of a paper or one of the homeworks that I will ask during lectures.