Macro in the Econ Major and at Liberal Arts Colleges

Last week, I attended the 13th annual Conference of Macroeconomists from Liberal Arts Colleges, hosted this year by Davidson College. I also attended the conference two years ago at Union College. I can't recommend this conference strongly enough!

The conference is a response to the increasing expectation of high quality research at many liberal arts colleges. Many of us are the only macroeconomist at our college, and can't regularly attend macro seminars, so the conference is a much-needed opportunity to receive feedback on work in progress. (The paper I presented last time just came out in the Journal of Monetary Economics!)

This time, I presented "Inflation Expectations and the Price at the Pump" and discussed Erin Wolcott's paper, "Impact of Foreign Official Purchases of U.S.Treasuries on the Yield Curve."

There was a wide range of interesting work. For example, Gina Pieters presented “Bitcoin Reveals Unofficial Exchange Rates and Detects Capital Controls.” M. Saif Mehkari's work on “Repatriation Taxes” is highly relevant to today's policy discussions. Most of the presenters and attendees were junior faculty members, but three more senior scholars held a panel discussion at dinner. Next year, the conference will be held at Wake Forest.

I also attended a session on "Macro in the Econ Major" led by PJ Glandon. A link to his slides is here. One slide presented the image below, prompting an interesting discussion about whether and how we should tailor what is taught in macro courses to our perception of the students' interests and career goals.