Micro. Yee, haw.

Hey. I've been busy working (and reading Mike's blog at strainonlife.blogspot.com), so not much to post these days. I've added a link to the micro problems from the first half of my micro sequence in the upper right box, but I'm not posting assignments for micro as I'm basically just working through all of them. I didn't post what I did for my third macro assignment, but you can flip through the assignments from the third quarter (8107) -- there are some really interesting income fluctuation problems in there, and upon review, I found myself really enjoying these problems. I will add that though I didn't do the programming parts of these assignments, one of the problem sets (see Macro problems, 8107 PS #4, pages 39-40) required us to solve a standard income fluctuation bellman using 4 different methods, one of those being a new "endogenous grid" method, which is pretty ingenious. You can find info on how to solve these problems in Prof. Perri's lectures notes. I'm saving our fourth mini (mainly on contract theory, mechanism design, and time consistency problems) for a week or so from now.

The most interesting econ related thing I've read recently is a Chari-Kehoe Handbook in Economics paper on Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy. I've worked through most of the Fiscal policy, and next week I'll start tackling the monetary stuff (since we've got to review cash-in-advance models for our macro prelim anyways) next weekend.

Working on micro for the past week has reminded me how much a fundamental understanding of a few key math definitions and results can really make your micro life easy. Those results being: Upper and Lower Hemi-continuity of correspondences, the Theorem of the Maximum, and Brouwer and Kakutani's Fixed Point Theorems. It's a small list, but they're all rather important.

Ok. Well, that's what's keeping me busy. And for a little fun: ESPN on the Williams-amHerst rivalry.

Cheers,
Ariel

TDCEs and Me

So... spent the last two days working through the standard growth model as well as spending a lot of time working with Tax Distorted Competitive Equilibrium models (TDCEs). For some reason, Ramsey problems just didn't make any sense to me last fall, but, especially after working with them a lot under the auspices of repeated game theory this spring, I'm finally starting to feel comfortable with them. It's been a nice start, but now it's time to get into some problems with uncertainty and hopefully a little search theory, which I really enjoyed.

In other news, I saw ben this past weekend. He's preparing for his first exam which is this friday (Good Luck!) in Micro. He seemed well. And then, perhaps more relevant for those in new york right now, I saw this video on the nytimes website (I think). I wouldn't watch anything more than the first few seconds, but it's a pretty neat.

Best...

Committment Mechanisms

Hey.

So, since this space is dead anyway, I'm hijacking it for personal use. Basically, you'll now see a "Current Assignment" posted at the top right of the blog, and it lists the problems I'm currently working on in preparation for my prelim exams at the end of august. When I come across interesting problems, noteworthy ideas, or questions, I'll be writing posts about them. I'm hoping that frequent updating will keep some momentum going for me as I try to cram a year's worth of micro and macro into the next 7 weeks. I'll have the problems I'm working on and a link to the problems themselves up in that sidebar.

Feel free to chime in if you're interested in working along side with me.

Best wishes to all,
Ariel