ECON20001: Intermediate Macroeconomics

One Online MCT: 5%
Two assignments: 2 x 12.5% = 25%
Tutorial attendance and participation: 10%
Exam: 60%

Content:

Like its introductory predecessor, I found this subject immensely enjoyable and interesting. There are three main models that you’ll spend the majority of the time using:

-IS-LM model: A set of curves that describe the equilibrium values of output and interest rate in both the goods and financial markets.
-DAD-DAS model: Basically similar to the static AD-AS model but much harder, this was the hardest portion of the course in my opinion. You have to get your head around a tonne of “building blocks” that go into constructing this model, then conceptually grasp the role of expectations. Almost everyone struggles to get this the first time around.
-Solow-Swan model: An extension of the one you learnt before, nothing that new here.

You also touch on a few minor topics, including labour market flows, how “growth” is determined and finally a bit of open-economy macro.
Lectures were very useful and paced quite well. Mei takes her time to explain difficult concepts, and often tries to see things from the students perspective, in that she clearly sees what students would find difficult and attempts to clarify. Unlike some other lecturers I’ve had where they would blast through content with little regard for whether the student understood or not, Mei makes explicit the common pitfalls students fall into which I really appreciated.

The math itself isn’t hard at all: the most advanced you’ll get is taking a first derivative and setting equal to 0, the rest is just rearranging algebra and exponents.

A way to make this subject very easy for you is to develop intuition behind what the algebra says (this is something that Mei and the tute sheets harp on about). After you complete a question or as you derive an equation, ask yourself things like: should y increase as x increases? Why does a change in x not affect y? Why does this change in x increase y more than this change in another input variable?

If you master the intuition in this subject (which is really just applying common sense) then you’ll find that everything falls into place.

Tutorials:

Standard fare: Blue sheet, pink sheets etc.

Lots of the times I found that the pink sheet was too full of material so we’d often not get enough time to finish, and answers to pink sheet questions don’t get put up on the LMS so it was a pain at times.

However, tutorials were absolutely vital at clearing up questions from the lectures and clarifying confusing concepts. I learnt so much from the tutor walking us through the problem and explaining the pitfalls that students fall into, and since exam questions were similar to pink sheet questions the tutorials were an excellent way to develop exam technique (and also a free 10%!).

Assignments:

Assignments were quite difficult. Although most people scored highly (I think), they required a lot of time and a lot of excel number-crunching. Namely, they were all about calculating the “time path” of variables relative to their long-run/steady-state values when conditions in the economy changed. Nothing exciting and lots of it was just arduous excel manipulation that didn’t really aid in developing understanding of the content. The questions weren’t like the exam questions at all, so it wasn’t good for preparation purposes either.
Probably the only disappointing aspect of this subject.

Exam:

Exam follows the same format every semester. 20 marks worth of multi-choice, 20 marks worth of relatively easy short-answer (B), 20 marks worth of harder short-answer (C). A cool thing here is that there are 3 questions in sections B and C, so you only choose 2 out of the 3 to answer. This means you can skip a topic you’re not comfortable with which is always a plus.

As far as difficulty goes, I found that just going through the past papers and pink tute sheets is enough to get you through Multi-choice and section B comfortably. Part C is quite tricky however – it’s an extension of what you’ve learnt in class and you won’t have seen lots of it before. Most people in my semester I’ve talked to barely answered any of one of the section C questions, so you’ve really got to know the course inside and out to conquer these questions.

The saving grace is that if you scored highly in assignments and multi-choice/section B, you won’t need that many marks from C to get a high score.

Conclusion:

Inter Macro is a challenging yet interesting subject that extends on what you learnt in first year. The tutorials and the quality of the lecturer made it an enjoyable subject, but it was let down a bit in my opinion by the arduous and unnecessarily difficult assignments which is why I didn’t give it 5/5. The exam is always fair – there is enough easy stuff to make sure everyone passes but scoring very highly is a challenge. Probably my favourite subject I’ve taken throughout my time so far at uni.

Yes, with screen capture

Mei Dong

Yep, from the past three years (with worked solutions!!!)

4.5 out of 5

I dunno, didn’t bother to buy it. Lecture slides will suffice.

2 x 1hr lectures per week, 1 x 1hr tute per week

2017 Sem 2

H1

The assignments were completed either on your own or in a group of up to three people. They were quite difficult as there was a question for a couple of marks on each assignment that was deliberately unlike anything things seen in lectures or tutorials, and required a bit of original thinking. It’s worth mentioning that you needed to use excel in order to compute things over many periods and draw some graphs, although there wasn’t anything too complicated required from excel.

The online test only tested the first 4 or so weeks of material from memory, so with a bit of study it wasn’t too difficult to score highly in this. It is only worth 5%, but it’s nice to be sitting on a good mark going into the exam.

The tutorials were compulsory and you had to attend and complete the blue sheet prior in order to get your 10% (the usual pink sheet, blue sheet method was used). Of course you were allowed to miss one or two, but the pink sheet solutions weren’t uploaded so you needed to attend to get them. Unfortunately there tended to be a lot of content on the pink sheets, so most of the tutorials felt very rushed.

The exam questions were easier than the assignments, and you only had to do two of three in each of the two extended response sections. The easier questions tended to be longer, however, and you didn’t have an awful lot of time as explaining things could often take quite a while. If you are serious about doing well, then you need to have a good grip over the whole course. This also helps with the multiple choice – if you’ve seriously studied then you can pick a few of them off quite quickly without having to work them out.

Probably my favourite subject to date. Chris is a brilliant lecturer (although he said that he wouldn’t be teaching it in 2015 – he’s still the contact listed in the 2015 handbook). The course is quite demanding and moves through a fair amount of content, which, along with being more difficult in general, made it the hardest second year commerce subject I have taken. However, the content is interesting and is presented very well by Chris.

The course was more or less taught from scratch, but without prior knowledge from introductory macroeconomics the pace would have been terrifying. This definitely helped though in that you didn’t need to brush off your notes from a year ago at the start of the course. In general, intermediate macroeconomics took most of the things studied in first year and applied a more sophisticated model – typically a dynamic one, one that gives a “time path” of variables over a number of periods as they return (or perhaps not) to their equilibrium values. The maths involved in these seems to throw some students off as the algebra can get quite messy, however there doesn’t tend to be anything “genius” required in it – it’s just rearranging equations. If you’re fine with that then there’s nothing to worry about.

The subject starts with short-run macroeconomics, with the start looking very similar to introductory macroeconomics, before spending a few lectures putting together and applying the IS-LM model, which is basically sets of {output, interest rates} that describe equilibrium in goods and financial markets. The key difference from introductory macroeconomics being that now output varies with the interest rate. Chris likes to stress the importance of the (relative) magnitudes of the slopes of the two curves and the implications this has for fiscal and monetary policy, as well as what determines the slope – so make sure you learn this.
You then look very quickly at the labor market in a slightly more complicated way than in first year macro. Some of this pops up a little bit later in the course as well.
The next major topic is the dynamic aggregate demand/supply model, which is essentially a much harder version of the AD/AS model that you would have previously seen. It is important to be able to explain what causes each periodic readjustment, rather than just move this curve here and another curve there in order to get full marks.
The third topic is long-run macroeconomics, extending the familiar Solow (-Swan) model as well as a few smaller lectures on sources of growth and the beneficiaries of it.
Finally, you revisit the short-run the macroeconomics in the open economy.

Yes, with screen capture.

Chris Edmond

with challenging and interesting content and a great lecturer, this subject was a great experience. In addition to this, it helps with building general knowledge of how the economy works – something which is certainly worth knowing. I would definitely recommend this subject to anyone, especially those with a little bit of a mathematical bent!

Yes, around 3-4 “useful” ones, there were more but not specifically relevant to the course.

5/5

Unnecessary.

two 1-hour lectures and a 1-hour tutorial per week.

2014 Semester 2

H1