Macroeconomics

"This is more advanced and it’s a completely different animal because it’s a textbook with more specialized demands and a more specialized audience. The book is, broadly speaking, divided into two. The first part is rather technical. The technical complexity doesn’t come simply from the calculus, which is rather simple, although for this book, it’s definitely better if you have A-level math. I use it for my second-year macroeconomics undergraduate courses. We have two streams in our economics degree, and I teach on the more technical one, the BSc in economics. The book is more technical, not only from a mathematical point of view, but also from a logical point of view. The intuitions are elaborated in detail and very precise and the book requires you to think at a level of abstraction that is far higher than what Mankiw requires. All the concepts that he explains are derived from first principles and, in particular, from pure microeconomic theory. The topics are pretty similar. You could map them, roughly speaking, from one book onto the other. But Williamson is way more technical. Williamson deals more with dynamic problems."