Research Interests

Decision Theory, General Equilibrium Theory, Matching Theory, Imperfect Competition

Lectures and Seminars

Intermediate Macroeconomics（Graduate/Postgraduate）

This course offers a theoretical treatment of many classical concepts and results in macroeconomics. It conveys how economists think of the economy at the aggregate level, and how this way of thinking is reflected in mathematical models of the economy. The intense schedule guides students through the theories of investment, consumption, aggregation, asset pricing, the real theory of interest, and various aspects of fiscal policy. The course aims at explaining both how macroeconomic models work mechanically, and how these models can be applied to analyze aspects of the real-world economy.

Macroeconomic Analysis I (Graduate/Postgraduate)

Macroeconomic Analysis I is the basic macroeconomic theory course within the KIMAP program. The course introduces students to macroeconomic modeling in infinite-horizon economies. The first part studies economies under certainty. Students learn how decisions of firms and consumers can be aggregated into the laws of motion of macroeconomic variables. The second part studies economies under uncertainty and puts particular emphasis on recursive methods. Students are accustomed to stochastic dynamic programming and learn how economic fluctuations can be explained by uncertainty about future productivity and income. Several applications illustrate how insights from this course can help understand real-world economic phenomena.

General Equilibrium Theory (Graduate/Postgraduate)

This is an advanced course on economic modeling. Its target audience are graduate students in economics, as well as ambitious undergraduate students from any field with a solid background in mathematics. The course offers a step-by-step introduction to the underlying principles of an economic model, and equips students with the methodological knowledge necessary for its construction and analysis. Students learn how to prove classical results on efficiency, existence, and multiplicity of equilibrium, using methods from variational analysis, fixed point theory, and differential topology as tools. A strong focus is placed on understanding markets with imperfections: The course addresses how market incompleteness tampers not only with welfare but with the theoretical underpinnings of general equilibrium models. A discussion of recent results outlines the research frontier in the field of incomplete markets.

Contact

E-mail

zierhut(at)econ.kobe-u.ac.jp

Office hours

By appointment.