Anyone TAKEN a macro course which used Sargent's Recursive Macroeconomics.

[_nanashi]

Particularly what chapters did you cover and over what time span? How closely did you follow the book? I'm trying to work through it over this summer, but I realize there is no way I can cover the whole book unless I wanted to sit down 7 or 8 hours every day to study it. If anyone has a syllabus, or a suggestion of what might be useful to cover for a student who knows basic dynamic programming (though not in the level of detail that is covered in the text itself when dynamic programming is taught).

[gramophone]

In my opinion, first 15 chapters are essential and what every graduate level macro course must cover. The rest consists of higher level, or sometimes less important topics, so you may omit in your first study.

In my program, one year graduate macro course is equivalent to chapter 6~chpater 15 of LS+some selected chapters among the rest+topics which LS does not cover.

[_nanashi]

How essential is chapter 2-6. I was studying them in detail, but how extensively does one need to know them later in the text, if one knows some Dynamic Programming albeit not at the same level?

[gramophone]

I think you don't need to study every detail of dynamic programming of LS, if this is your first study of graduate macro. In my opinion, you can just omit chapter 1-6, if you have no problem to transform sequential problem into recursive problem (i.e., bellman equation), and if you already know how to solve bellman equation. i.e. (i) how to solve bellman equation analytically by first order condition and envelope theorem (ii) how to implement value function iteration and get numerical (approximated) solution of bellman equation. Computational issues introduced in chapter 4 LS can be omitted, but chapter 5 and 6 might be useful because these two chapters are basically showing how to solve bellman equation by examples.

Have ever read Per Krusell's lecture note? I think it is more readable and actually better than LS for self-study.

[treblekicker]

one helpful tip: sargent has solutions to the first edition on his website (or maybe not, either way, you can easily google them). the ordering of the chapters is a bit different, but most of the problems are the same.

[asquare]

Yes, solutions for the first edition are available from Sargent's website. Here is a link to the PDF file: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ts43/books/RMT1_answers.pdf

[rob59404]

On a related note, how often is optimal control used in modern macro or other fields for that matter? It looks like most books focus on dynamic programming.

[IrrationalActor]

Sargent/Lundquist is not a good book for learning dynamic programming; unfortunately Stokey Lucas is really the only game in town for that. The DP stuff in Sargent is very computationally based Stokey-Lucas does a better job with the theory. Here is my TAs advice for studying from Sargent:

Start with Chapter 12 (Recursive CE) . Then Chapter 8 (Complete Markets) and skip to
Part IV (Incomplete Markets). [other important chapters] Asset Pricing (Chapter 13)
Money (Chapters 24 and 25) and Search (Chapters 6 and 26).

[_nanashi]

This for me is work over the summer to try to close some of the gap between coursework at a top 40 School and a school outside the top 50. So I'm not really interested in other texts (as I'm already working through Heidjra, and Obstfeld+Rogoff on top of this. I've already had a first year macro course.

[Kaysa]

I think we covered the first 12-15 chapters. I am not sure though because I never opened the book.