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Best Micro/Macro Books


Economics4Life

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Intro: tons

Intermediate micro: Varian

Intermediate macro: Romer

Advanced micro: MWG (used throughout the year in the micro sequence at most/all programs)

Advanced macro: difficult to say. There isn't one "end all be all" text like MWG. For the macro sequence here, we would have textbooks for each unit, but there really isn't a book that encompasses all of our topics.

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Some are my own experiences and some are recommendation from others

Intro: Micro(Goolsbee) Macro(no idea)

Intermediate: Micro(Varian new) Macro(Blanchard; Manfred Gartner's book is very concise and dense; Sorensen and Whitta-Jacobsen have a pretty good one bridging intermediate and advanced)

Advanced: Micro(MWG and perhaps Kreps?) Macro(Romer)

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My memory is failing from my undergrad years, but I have to teach now, so here's my view from the other end:

 

I used Blanchard and Johnson for intermediate macro, which was OK, although I'm thinking of switching to the Jones textbook, which feels less like lying.

 

Not strictly core courses, but I'll say that Weil's economic growth text is perhaps the best undergrad textbook I've used; useful into grad school too, for getting the intuition of growth models. There isn't a good public finance textbook, unfortunately. Gruber is probably better than Rosen and Gayer, but that may be my ideological priors talking.

 

(Is the Goolsbee intro to micro text really good, compared to Mankiw or Case & Fair? I have to teach a section of Principles next year, and no one uses Goolsbee here.)

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The recommendations in this thread are good, but as an aside: I strongly think that textbooks shouldn't be used other than as a reference/secondary source material for review once you get to the grad level. Almost all of the common texts are fairly dated, and this is problematic even in micro theory - you're often unconsciously led into an already-sterile research area, even as you think you're just "learning the tools". The saying goes that economic theory has a half-life of 10-15 years. MWG I think is really, really problematic in this aspect; its theoretical style is a relic from the 90s and in terms of topics covered it has something like 10% overlap with most of what we consider contemporary applied theory. Ideally most students should learn first-year subjects from lecture notes which are kept up to date (good if there are ones for your class; otherwise, look up for notes from e.g. Stanford's classes), and then move on to field-specific books and references (of which there are many more) and recent papers in their second year. Edited by chateauheart
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