ECON 222 – Principles of Macroeconomics
(Section 2)
Dr. William Hauk
Class Times: Monday, Wednesday & Friday 11:15-12:05
Class Location: BA 002
Instructor Email: hauk@moore.sc.edu
Instructor Phone: 777-6044
Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday 3:30-5:00 BA 413
Course Overview:
The purpose of this course is to provide a broad survey of the field of macroeconomics at
an introductory level. During the semester, we will cover topics relating to
macroeconomic statistics, economic growth theory and macroeconomic policy
stabilization. Emphasis will be put on developing the analytical tools needed to apply
economic methods to contemporary problems.
The main textbook will be N. Gregory Mankiw’s Brief Principles of Macroeconomics, 4th
ed. from Thomson-Southwestern publishers. The course will make heavy use of problem
sets from the Aplia online economics package and materials may be distributed through
the Blackboard website, so please register for them and make sure that you know how to
use them.
Grading:
You final grade will consist of five components:
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Class attendance and participation
Online homework assignments
Two Midterm Exams
Final Exam
Class attendance and participation will count for 10% of your grade. Of the other four
components, your two highest curved grades will each count for 30% of your grade and
the two lowest curved grades will each count for 15% of your grade.
Class Attendance and Participation:
In order to fully understand the material being taught, it is imperative that you attend all
classes and actively participate in the lectures. I will grade your attendance by
occasionally cold-calling your name from a class roster. While I will not grade you
directly on the content of your answer, I will make a note of your attempt (or lack
thereof) at answering the question. Should you miss more than two questions, you will
see points deducted from your attendance grade. Announcements may be made in class,
so please make sure to catch up with a fellow student should you miss a class.
Online Assignments:
This course will make heavy use of the Aplia online economics package for regular
problem sets. Please register for and become familiar with this website. Assignments
will generally be due at 6:00 AM on Monday mornings, and these will be very “hard”
deadlines in that I will not be able to grant extensions after the fact without erasing the
scores of everyone in the class. Please check the website for more specific details on
assignments and due dates. For registration and general instructions, please see the
“Getting Started with Aplia” sheet posted in the course documents section of the
Blackboard website.
On Wednesday, Oct. 1st and Monday, Nov. 24th, we will be using Aplia for interactive
online experiments. In lieu of coming to class, please be at a computer logged on to
Aplia at the scheduled class time.
Mid-Term Exams:
There will be two midterm exams for this course: one on Wednesday, Sept. 24th and one
on Wednesday, Oct. 29th. Both will be held in class and both will be non-cumulative
(only covering material since the previous exam.) All exams will have a multiple-choice
format.
Final Exam:
The final exam will take place at the university-scheduled time of 9:00 AM on
Wednesday, Dec 10th. It will be a cumulative exam covering the entire course, albeit
weighted towards material covered after the second mid-term exam.
Readings and Lectures:
Aug. 22 – Introduction to the Course.
Aug. 25 – Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics. Read Mankiw chap. 1.
Aug. 27 – Thinking Like an Economist #1. Read Mankiw chap. 2.
Aug. 29 – Thinking Like an Economist #2. Review Mankiw chap. 2.
Sept. 1 – NO CLASS – LABOR DAY
Sept. 3 – Interdependence and the Gains from Trade #1. Read Mankiw chap. 3.
Sept. 5 – Interdependence and the Gains from Trade #2. Review Mankiw chap. 3.
Sept. 8 – Supply and Demand #1. Read Mankiw chap. 4.
Sept. 10 – Supply and Demand #2. Review Mankiw chap. 4.
Sept. 12 – NO CLASS – DR. HAUK AWAY AT CONFERENCE
Sept. 15 – Measuring a Nation’s Income #1. Read Mankiw chap. 5.
Sept. 17 – Measuring a Nation’s Income #2. Review Mankiw chap. 5.
Sept. 19 – Measuring the Cost of Living #1. Read Mankiw chap. 6.
Sept. 22 – Measuring the Cost of Living #2. Review Mankiw chap. 6.
Sept. 24 – MIDTERM EXAM #1 IN CLASS
Sept. 26 – Production and Growth #1. Read Mankiw chap. 7.
Sept. 29 – Production and Growth #2. Review Mankiw chap. 7.
Oct. 1 – Aplia Experiment “Labor Markets” – Be at a computer!
Oct. 3 – Savings and Investment #1. Read Mankiw chap. 8.
Oct. 6 – Savings and Investment #2. Review Mankiw chap. 8.
Oct. 8 – Basic Tools of Finance #1. Read Mankiw chap. 9.
Oct. 10 – NO CLASS – FALL BREAK
Oct. 13 – Basic Tools of Finance #2. Review Mankiw chap. 9.
Oct. 15 – Unemployment #1. Read Mankiw chap. 10.
Oct. 17 – Unemployment #2. Review Mankiw chap. 10.
Oct. 20 – The Monetary System #1. Read Mankiw chap. 11.
Oct. 22 – The Monetary System #2. Review Mankiw chap. 11.
Oct. 24 – Money Growth and Inflation #1. Read Mankiw chap. 12.
Oct. 27 – Money Growth and Inflation #2. Review Mankiw chap. 12.
Oct. 29 – MIDTERM EXAM #2 IN CLASS
Oct. 31 – Open Economy Macroeconomics Concepts #1. Read Mankiw chap. 13.
Nov. 3 – Open Economy Macroeconomics Concepts #2. Review Mankiw chap. 13.
Nov. 5 – Open Economy Macroeconomics Theory #1. Read Mankiw chap. 14.
Nov. 7 – Open Economy Macroeconomics Theory #2. Review Mankiw chap. 14.
Nov. 10 – Aggregate Demand and Supply #1. Read Mankiw chap. 15.
Nov. 12 – Aggregate Demand and Supply #2. Review Mankiw chap. 15.
Nov. 14 – Monetary and Fiscal Policy #1. Read Mankiw chap. 16.
Nov. 17 – Monetary and Fiscal Policy #2. Review Mankiw chap. 16.
Nov. 19 – Inflation and Unemployment #1. Read Mankiw chap. 17.
Nov. 21 – NO CLASS – DR. HAUK AWAY AT CONFERENCE
Nov. 24 – Aplia Experiment “Fixed and Flexible Prices” – Be at a computer!
Nov. 26 & 28 – NO CLASS – THANKSGIVING BREAK
Dec. 1 – Inflation and Unemployment #2. Review Mankiw chap. 17.
Dec. 3 – 5 Debates about Macroeconomic Policy #1. Read Mankiw chap. 18.
Dec. 5 – 5 Debate about Macroeconomic Policy #2. Review Mankiw chap. 18.
Dec. 10 – FINAL EXAM AT 9:00 AM
Course Policies – ECON 222 Fall 2008
Class Attendance – Enrollment for this class about 80 students. You are all more or less
adults. Therefore, I will not take attendance on a regular basis. However, I will grade
your attendance by occasionally cold-calling your name from a class roster. While I will
not grade you directly on the content of your answer, I will make a note of your attempt
(or lack thereof) at answering the question. Should you be absent for more than two
questions, you will see points deducted from your attendance grade. Also, important
announcements will often be made in class. Hence, do not miss class for frivolous
reasons, and if you absolutely cannot help being absent, please ask a fellow classmate
about any material that you missed.
Cell Phones – I consider improper cell phone etiquette to be one of the banes of modern
existence. Should your phone make two audible rings during class, you may do one of
two things with it: 1) Allow me to answer it, or 2) Answer it yourself and proceed to
summarize what we discussed in class before hanging up. You may find it less
embarrassing to simply remember to turn off your phone before class.
Grading Policy – Each of the three exams and your final homework grade will be
curved, should the grade distribution be lower than a standard distribution. With the sole
exception of the pre- and post-tests on graphs in Aplia (as described in the “Getting
Started with Aplia” sheet), I will not drop any of your grades. Therefore, a low score on
a difficult assignment that you tried to do will be better for your grade than a zero on an
assignment that you did not try to do.
At the end of the semester, I will average your curved grades with 30% weight going to
each of your two best curved scores and 15% weight going to each of your two worst
curved scores. Your class attendance grade (10% weight) will be added to that. People
with grades in the 90s will receive A’s, those with grades in the 80s will receive B’s, and
so on. Within each decade, if you have a 6 or higher, you will receive a +. While I am
willing to look at genuine errors in grading, I will be more annoyed than impressed by
your persistence in claiming that I should give you a B in the class because you really
want or need one. Please make a special note about my rounding policy – I will round to
the nearest whole percent, and no further. Should you have an average of 89.499999%,
your grade will be a B+.
I do not give extra credit assignments. On the other hand, I do give lots of regular credit,
and no one assignment in this class is worth so large a fraction of your grade that a poor
grade on one cannot be made up for with strong performances on other assignments.
I should also mention that I have taught enough courses in introductory economics to
expect that some people will catch on to the material faster than others. As a result, some
people will be able to do well in the course with less apparent effort than others. This is
why it is said that life is unfair. However, I do strongly believe that your final grade will,
to some degree, be correlated with the amount of effort that you put into the course. You
should know, though, that I can only give grades based on the results of your homework
assignments and exams, as I cannot directly observe your effort.
Illness / Other Emergencies – Should you be unable to complete a homework
assignment because of an illness or other emergency, please inform me as soon as
possible. While I cannot grant extensions or make-up assignments, I will, on a case-bycase basis, consider dropping certain assignments from your grade, but only if you notify
me as soon as possible after the assignment due date. Students who consider a busy
social schedule sufficient reason for not doing their homework will be laughed at.
Should you miss an exam because of illness or emergency, I will require that you show a
doctor’s receipt or other evidence of the emergency and ask you to reschedule your exam
as soon as possible.
If you anticipate missing an exam for a university event or other scheduled function,
please let me know as far in advance as you know about the conflict. I am generally
happy to make arrangements for students to take an exam early, and considerably more
reluctant to allow them to take it late for non-emergency reasons. If you only inform me
of your absence after the fact, you risk receiving a zero for the exam in question.
Exams – Exams will all be in multiple-choice format. You may use a calculator, but you
may not use any other notes or books. If you believe that I have incorrectly graded your
exam, you may ask me about it. However, I cannot re-grade exams where the relevant
problem is an improperly erased answer, as I have no means of knowing whether or not
the answer was erased before or after grading.
My general advice about studying for exams is that you should do four things, in
decreasing order of importance: 1) Do the old exams or practice exams that I will post
online a week or so before the exams, so you can both review and get a feeling for the
types of questions that I will ask. 2) (Re)Do the practice problem sets in Aplia. The best
way to learn the material is by doing problems. I will give you instructions about
clearing old answers as the exam approaches. 3) Review your class notes. Obviously,
the stuff that I talk about in class the most is the stuff that I think is the most important.
4) If all else fails, re-read the textbook. I don’t recommend using this as your primary
study method, but if you’re struggling with something in particular and your notes don’t
make any sense, it’s a good fall-back resource. (This is distinct from reading your
textbook for the first time – you’ll understand the material in class better if you’ve seen it
before, even in a superficial manner.)
Office Hours – Virtually all students will occasionally struggle with some of the
material. Therefore, I will have office hours on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:305:00 in the afternoon in office BA 413 unless I announce otherwise. Should you need to
see me outside these hours, please schedule an appointment via email. Please make use
of this resource.
Getting Started With Aplia – ECON 222, Fall 2008
Buying a Textbook and Aplia Access – As I mentioned in previous email messages, the
easiest way to get Aplia access is to buy a new copy of the Mankiw textbook that comes
labeled as having an Aplia access card inside. If the bookstore is not carrying these,
please feel free to point out that Prof. Hauk wrote in big bold letters on the book request
form that they needed to carry the Aplia edition of the textbook. If you have one of these
books, good – skip ahead to the next paragraph.
If you don’t yet have a textbook with an Aplia access card inside, then you have a few
options to consider. One is, of course, buying the new textbook with the Aplia access
card. You can also buy access to Aplia without a card for $70. If you do, you will get a
full online version of the textbook; so, if you don’t mind reading long passages of text
online, you may find this path the easiest and cheapest way to go. Alternatively, you
could buy a cheap used copy of the Mankiw textbook. Whatever your choices, you must
buy access to Aplia for this course. If you are uncertain about whether or not you will
drop this course, you can still register for Aplia and defer payment until September 14th,
which is well after the normal add/drop period. If you have not paid by the 14th, you will
lose your access to the website.
Registering for Aplia – There are detailed instructions for registering at the end of the
syllabus. Please go check it for details. If you go to the website, it should be pretty
straightforward what you need to do in order to register. The registration key for this
course is CDXB-CDJG-TTVE. Please register with the email address that you use the
most frequently, as I will use this address to send messages to the class for the rest of the
semester.
Using Aplia – Now that you’re registered, go to the course homepage and click on the
tab in the upper-right hand of the screen that says “Assignments,” and your assignments
for the first three weeks of class will appear on screen. Aplia has three basic types of
assignments – readings, practice assignments, and graded assignments. Readings are
chapters from the textbook (and potentially other sources) that are assigned for the day of
the class when we will be discussing them. If you have a paper copy of the textbook,
then you can read the paper copy and ignore these and just use Aplia as a reminder for
when we’ll be discussing those readings.
Practice problem sets are problems sets that, as the name suggests, are simply there for
your own practice. While they have “due dates,” you can do them whenever you like and
do as much or as little of them as you find helpful. They can be quite helpful since you
get feedback on your answers right away. So if you’re struggling with a particular
concept, you may find these useful to do. In general they will be “due” at the same time
as their corresponding graded problem sets, which brings us to…
Graded problem sets will, unless otherwise announced, be due on Monday mornings at
6:00 AM and will cover the chapter(s) that we went over in class during the previous
week. You may play around with the problem set and change your answers until the time
that it is due, but at that time, the problem set will be graded and you will not be able to
change your answers. As I said before, this is a hard deadline – once the deadline has
passed, I cannot give an extension without forcing the entire class to redo the problem
set, so I certainly won’t be inclined to do so.
There is one more type of assignment: News Analysis. These consist of a short news
article and a set of graded questions about the article and the economics behind the story.
Don’t forget to do these when they are assigned!
Aplia: The First Couple Weeks – When you first look at the assignments, you might
notice that there are not any for week one, and then several for either the Friday of week
two or the Monday of week three. I set it up this way intentionally, because several
people are still adding into the course during this week, and they might need a couple
extra days. However, you who are already enrolled in the course can start now. In fact, I
highly recommend that you get going on the Aplia assignments that you can do now.
If you wait until next weekend, you will have a tough time finishing them all.
So, where should you start? I’d start with the “Introductory Practice Problem Set” and
the “Interactive Tool Tutorial,” and once you get the hang of the Aplia interface, do the
“Introductory Graded Problem Set.”
The next thing that I would work on is the (graded) “Pretest.” The pretest tests your
knowledge of how graphs work, which is important, because we will be using graphs
quite a bit this semester. If you do well on the Pretest, then wonderful! If not, then you
can get some more practice on graphs with the “Math and Graphs Tutorial.” After
you’ve had some practice on that, you can then try the “Posttest.” Because not
everybody is coming into this class with the same skill level in interpreting graphs, I will
drop your lowest score from the Pretest and Posttest from your final grade. None of these
assignments are based on material done in class, so I would get started on these right
away.
After you finish these problems, then you can start working on the more substantive
problem sets. For each book chapter, there is a practice problem set (that has a “I” after
the chapter title) and a graded problem set (that has a “II” after the chapter title.) As of
the end of the second week, you can do the problem sets on “Thinking Like an
Economist.”
If you have any further questions, please email or call me.