Advanced Macroeconomics

"Romer is very advanced undergraduate level or early postgraduate. If you study macroeconomics at an advanced level, you will come across this book. If you want to have a comprehensive and broad perspective of what macroeconomic theory is today, in the broadest and most concise form, this is the book. He has 13 or 14 chapters. Each chapter is a fundamental section of macroeconomics, starting with economic growth, going on to endogenous growth and the economics of ideas, economics of information, economics of monetary policy, fiscal policy, employment—you name it. It’s the most comprehensive, and it’s accessible. The level of analytical skills that you need is quite advanced, in the sense that now, even with A-level math, you’ll need to go through things step-by-step several times. One of the things students used to tell me is that they need to read the book three or four times before they start grasping the general idea. My general reply to them is that every time I open the book again, I notice an extra detail, an extra formula or an extra logical step or something that I had missed before. And I’ve been studying and teaching this book for 15 years. That’s the interesting thing with Romer. He manages to give an introduction to the state-of-the-art theory in every single aspect of macroeconomics. The book has 14 chapters and each chapter is a research agenda in economics . Which is most active really depends on the year. Some years it’s unemployment, some years it’s fiscal policy, some years it’s monetary policy, but that doesn’t mean that the others are not in fashion. It’s just that sometimes one area might get more attention than the others, which may be related just to the agenda at particular academic journals as much as anything else. But every chapter is representative of a very active field in macroeconomics. One of the great things about the book is that, if you have a 15-week course, you can really go through the entire book. But if you have five weeks, you can just select five chapters. Each chapter is self-contained and can be studied in isolation."