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This short, concrete, and to-the-point book guides students through this vast field of conflicting opinions. The book begins with the premise that students benefit most from seeing a balanced treatment of all available views. For instance, it provides coverage of both ad hoc and optimizing models and also explores divisions such as flexible price versus sticky price models, rationality versus irrationality, and calibration versus statistical inference. By giving consideration to each of these "mini debates," this book shows how each approach has its good and bad points.International Macroeconomics and Finance also excels in its integration of theoretical and empirical issues: the theory is introduced by developing the canonical model in a topic area and then its predictions are evaluated quantitatively. Bot the calibration method and standard econometric methods are covered. To avoid the "black-box" perception that students sometimes develop, almost all of the results presented here are derived step-by-step from first principles. A conversational, logical presentation also makes this a supreme learning tool.
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International Macroeconomics and Finance: Theory and Empirical Methods Nelson C. Mark December 12, 2000 forthcoming, Blackwell Publishers
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To Shirley, Laurie, and Lesli
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Preface This book grew out of my lecture notes for a graduate course in international macroeconomics and Þnance that I teach at the Ohio State University. The book is targeted towards second year graduate students in a Ph.D. program. The material is accessible to those who have completed core courses in statistics, econometrics, and macroeconomic theory typically taken in the Þrst year of graduate study. These days, there is a high level of interaction between empirical and theoretical research. This book reßects this healthy development by integrati