Macroeconomic Theory
Spring 2011
Jeffrey Parker, Reed College
Project #8, presentations April 14 and 15
For this project, each group will make a 10-minute presentation summarizing the results of an empirical paper relating to price stickiness or some related aspect of business-cycle theory. The presentations will be made in class on Thursday, April 14 and Friday, April 15, the date on which your income-tax returns are also due. If you have time to read one or two of the papers other than the one assigned to you, it would be helpful to have some informed listeners who can ask questions. Papers will be presented in the order given below, with the first three or four on Thursday and the remainder on Friday.
Papers
- Casey Anderson and Sean Howard
Bils, Mark, and Peter Klenow, "Some Evidence on the Importance of Sticky Prices," Journal of Political Economy 112(5), October 2004, 947-985. - Martis Buchholz and Zach Horvath
Dhyne, Emmanuel, et al., "Price Changes in the Euro Area and the United States: Some Facts from Individual Consumer Price Data," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(2), Spring 2006, 171-192. - Lauren DeRosa and Jess Delaney
Blinder, Alan S., "On Sticky Prices: Academic Theories Meet the Real World," in N. Gregory Mankiw, ed., Monetary Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 117-150. (Book is on reserve.) - Svetoslav Ivanov and Joseph Warren
Levy, Daniel, Mark Bergen, Shantanu Dutta, and Robert Venable, "The Magnitude of Menu Costs: Direct Evidence from Large U.S. Supermarket Chains," Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(3), August 1997, 791-825. - Luis Lopez and Thomas Verghese
Hobijn, Bart, Federico Ravenna, and Andrea Tambalotti, "Menu Costs at Work: Restaurant Prices and the Introduction of the Euro," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(3), August 2006, 1103-31. - Brian Moore and Li Zha
Eichenbaum, Martin, Nir Jaimovich, and Sergio Rebelo, "Reference Prices, Costs, and Nominal Rigidities," American Economic Review 101(1), February 2011, 234-262. - Lewis May and Justin Stewart
Campbell, Carl M., III and Kunal S. Kamlani, "The Reasons for Wage Rigidity: Evidence from a Survey of Firms," Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(3), 1997, 759-789.
Guidelines for Presentations
Ten minutes is not very much time. You will only have time to present 3-4 major points very briefly. These points should define the question that the authors are trying to answer, summarize quickly the method they used to answer it, and summarize their results. Your job is the inform your classmates who haven't read the paper. What are the "take-away points" that they should know about the paper, both in terms of results and in terms of how the results were generated?
I would recommend that you prepare a slideshow in Powerpoint (or equivalent software) that has no more than 5-6 slides: One introductory slide with an outline of your presentation, one that summarizes the method/data used, and some slides displaying a few key tables and graphs that highlight key features of the results, plus a conclusion slide at the end summarizing the take-away points and their relation to macroeconomics. You are strongly encouraged to submit an outline of your presentation and/or your slides to the instructor a day before to assure that you are covering the most important concepts of the paper.
Assessment
I will ask each student to complete a brief assessment of all of the presentations (excluding his or her own). The assessment criteria will relate to the degree of understanding of the paper that the audience member achieved from the presentation. I will also do my own assessment, both of the effectiveness of the presentation and of whether the points covered were chosen well.