一个宏观经济学书评：
Blanchard / Fischer “Lectures on Macroeconomics” (MIT, 1e: 1989) The old stand-by, still good for a solid, "eclectic" first-semester course.
Ljungqvist / Sargent “Recursive Macroeconomic Theory” (MIT, 1e: 2000) Samples a lot of modern technique and selected applications; reads like a set of rough lecture notes. Now a voluminous second edition has been drafted and is still available for free downloading (as is a first go at a solution manual).
Romer “Advanced Macroeconomics” (McGraw-Hill, 2e: 2001) ☼ Thoughtful and empirically driven, at an undergraduate level, really. In survey manner, the book covers the intuition of influential models, but does not attempt to build technical skills.
There are many approaches to teaching first-year macro, but roughly we could group them into those that consistently work with special cases of the neoclassical growth model and those covering an eclectic range of models with diverse assumptions and occasional handwaving about micro foundations in favor of an interesting result. The former school of thought is sometimes labeled as "freshwater" (since its proponents are located around the Great Lakes), and the latter as "saltwater" (as it is popular along the US coasts). My impression is that the "freshwater" school is carrying the day and dominating the modern literature, but not everyone would agree. There is now a nice introduction to dynamic programming, numerical methods, stochastic growth, time series econometrics etc. all in one small book: Adda / Cooper's "Dynamic Economics: Quantitative Methods and Applications." It's an ideal and reasonably priced entry to "freshwater macro." Sargent has an older text, called “Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory,” accompanied by Manuelli's solution manual - I haven’t read this, but by the looks of the content, it is still relevant (less true of the immediate predecessor, Sargent's "Macroeconomic Theory"). Azariadis’ “Intertemporal Macroeconomics” I haven’t read; it appears to emphasize differential equations and dynamic methods with a "freshwater" leaning. Chicago-schoolers swear by Stokey / Lucas / Prescott's “Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics,” a detailed exposition of dynamic programming theory and a second-term / second-year must-read for macroeconomists. Now there's a solution manual (Irigoyen et al.) - you'll probably need it.
For growth theory, the standard source is Barro / Sala-i-Martin’s “Economic Growth” ☼, a good overview. Aghion / Howitt’s “Endogenous Growth Theory” is a specialized treatment. Open economy macroeconomics is covered extensively (and, by all accounts, very well) in Obstfeld / Rogoff’s “Foundations of International Macroeconomics.” For numerical methods, which have become essential to computational macroeconomics, Judd’s text “Numerical Methods in Economics” is widely used - but it is not (as one might expect) a simultaneous introduction to Matlab.
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There are many approaches to teaching first-year macro, but roughly we could group them into those that consistently work with special cases of the neoclassical growth model and those covering an eclectic range of models with diverse assumptions and occasional handwaving about micro foundations in favor of an interesting result. The former school of thought is sometimes labeled as "freshwater" (since its proponents are located around the Great Lakes), and the latter as "saltwater" (as it is popular along the US coasts). My impression is that the "freshwater" school is carrying the day and dominating the modern literature, but not everyone would agree. There is now a nice introduction to dynamic programming, numerical methods, stochastic growth, time series econometrics etc. all in one small book: Adda / Cooper's "Dynamic Economics: Quantitative Methods and Applications." It's an ideal and reasonably priced entry to "freshwater macro."
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————————这段话比较重要，尤其是————My impression is that the "freshwater" school is carrying the day and dominating the modern literature, but not everyone would agree。
还有“(Incidentally, Chiang's other book, "Elements of Dynamic Optimization" is not worth getting: it's in continuous time, whereas in much of modern macro you want discrete time.) ”————注：指蒋中一的《动态最优化基础》
——————————————现在在绝大部分宏观论文中，discrete time模型占主导地位。所以在现代宏观经济学中，变分法、最优控制方法的地位远没有动态规划（尤其是离散动态规划）重要。 当然传统的增长理论是用不少连续时间模型的，Aghion / Howitt’s “Endogenous Growth Theory” 也是连续时间风格的，这与他们的HARVARD/MIT背景有关。 但“in much of modern macro you want discrete time”说的一点错都没有，看看Ljungqvist / Sargent的 “Recursive Macroeconomic Theory”就 会对这种说法有切身体会。
[此贴子已经被作者于2004-11-10 23:08:24编辑过]
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