Contemporary macroeconomics is built upon microeconomic principles, with its most recent advance featuring dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The textbook by Heer and Maußner acquaints readers with the essential computational techniques required to tackle these models and employ them for quantitative analysis. This third edition maintains the structure of the second, dividing the content into three separate parts dedicated to representative agent models, heterogeneous agent models, and numerical methods. At the same time, every chapter has been revised and two entirely new chapters have been added.
The updated content reflects the latest advances in both numerical methods and their applications in macroeconomics, spanning areas like business-cycle analysis, economic growth theory, distributional economics, monetary and fiscal policy. The two new chapters delve into advanced techniques, including higher-order perturbation, weighted residual methods, and solutions to high-dimensional nonlinear problems. In addition, the authors present further insights from macroeconomic theory, complemented by practical applications like the Smolyak algorithm, Gorman aggregation, rare disaster models and dynamic Laffer curves. Lastly, the new edition places special emphasis on practical implementation across various programming languages; accordingly, its accompanying web page offers examples of computer code for languages such as MATLAB®, GAUSS, Fortran, Julia and Python.
Burkhard Heer is a professor of public economics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Previously, he was professor of economics at the Universities of Bolzano, Bamberg, and Innsbruck. Burkhard Heer received his PhD in economics from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 1996. He was visiting scholar at various institutions including Georgetown University, Stanford University, Fordham University at New York, University of Quebec at Montreal, University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the Federal Reserve Bank at St. Louis. Burkhard Heer is also affiliated with the Center for Economic Studies (CESifo), Munich, and NETSPAR, Tilburg. His research interests include public economics and macroeconomics. He also published a Springer textbook on “Public Economics”.
Alfred Maußner is a professor of empirical macroeconomics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Previously he was professor of economics at the Universities of Bamberg and Cologne. He received his PhD in Economics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1984. He was visiting scholar at the University of Athens, Georgia and the University of California in Los Angeles. His research interests include economic growth, business cycles, and computational methods. He is author/co-author of several textbooks published in German.
