Advanced Macroeconomics – Dirk Krüger

Course Description:

This course covers topics in the research field of macroeconomics with household heterogeneity. It is concerned with constructing, computing and empirically evaluating dynamic stochastic macroeconomic models in which individual households differ according their abilities, wages, incomes, preferences or market opportunities in a way such that the household sector cannot be aggregated into a representative agent. In these models, therefore, aggregate allocations and prices will depend on the cross-sectional household distribution of household characteristics. We will argue that the macroeconomic implications of these models differ, often (but not always) in a quantitatively significant way, from their representative agent counterpart. In addition, these models are in principle suitable to ask and answer positive and normative distributional questions about which the representative household paradigm is silent by construction. 

Dirk Krüger (Penn)

Dirk Krüger is professor of Economics at University of Pennsylvania. His research has focused on whether, how and to what extent risk, a central concern in macroeconomics, is shared across households or groups of households.