Recent literature on the interplay between inequality, monetary policy and optimal taxation is surveyed. Additionally, recent literature on human capital accumulation, consumption, intergenerational mobility, wealth inequality and credit markets are covered, all from the perspective of equilibrium models with heterogeneous households.
The course also teaches practical skills in quantitative methods. A rough list of topics is: review VFI and discrete solution methods for heterogeneous agent (HA) models; Matlab code optimization topics: vectorization, parfor, sparse matrices, automatic differentiation; continuous variable approaches to solving HA models; labour supply and basic macro-public finance; earnings process estimation; heterogeneity with aggregate shocks a la Krusell-Smith; continuous time HA models; the HACT toolbox; Machine/Deep Learning in Macroeconomics; Important datasets for macro.