This course will give you the tools to answer questions like: How does rising inflation affect the demand for businesses' products or their ability to hire and retain workers? How much control does the government have over inflation and can politicians really create jobs? What does it mean for business and workers when the Fed starts raising interest rates?
To answer these and similar questions we refer to data from past episodes, and build a unified modeling framework which helps us to interpret the data and make predictions. We then apply our framework to understand historical events like the Great Recession as well as to evaluate the importance to businesses of current macroeconomic phenomena such as rising inflation, tightening monetary policy, large pandemic recovery packages, and global supply chain issues arising from the pandemic and international conflict. For each topic covered in the class, we also discuss the most relevant current research.
This provides MBA students with the language and the tools necessary to understand how the broad economic environment (current geopolitical events, financial conditions, policy choices, etc.) affects business outcomes. The applied focus of this course on the business environment makes it valuable even for those students who have taken previous macroeconomics courses as undergraduates.