Setup

Undergraduate Computational Macroeconomics

This course is intended to be as accessible as possible for students with limited programming experience. Do not be scared off if you have the prerequisites but do not feel like you are a strong “programmer”.

It is strongly suggested to get GitHub’s student developer pack which gives you lots of free stuff (and even access to the AI GitHub Copilot ).

Why Julia?

This course will be taught using Julia. Beyond being an excellent language for technical computing and popular among macroeconomists and researchers in finance, Julia provides a new set of programming principles that will broaden the your knowledge of computing. This will help you by both providing a better differentiated resume, broader skills, and more opportunities to work as a research assistant for researchers requiring significant computational expertise.

See Why Julia? for more details.

Instructions

You can install Julia on your laptop by following these instructions. While one can use Julia entirely from just Jupyter notebook, we will also introduce basic GitHub and VS Code usage as well to help broaden your exposure to computational tools.

See here for detailed setup instructions for these lecture notes.

In particular, all of the slides in these lectures are available as a github repository, https://github.com/jlperla/undergrad_computational_macro_notebooks