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Unemployment: Spring 2024 Syllabus

Course description

The course's topic is unemployment. The course presents facts about the labor market and unemployment, models to describe unemployment, and policies to tackle unemployment. The course addresses several questions:

  • Why do we care about unemployment?
  • Why does unemployment exist?
  • Why does unemployment vary over the business cycle?
  • What is the socially optimal rate of unemployment?
  • How should policies respond to fluctuations in unemployment?

Course resources

Teaching time & location

  • Tuesday–Thursday, 3:20pm–4:55pm
  • Cowell Academic Building, room 131

Section time & location

  • Section A: Monday, 2:40pm–3:45pm, in Steven Academic Building, room 151
  • Section B: Wednesday, 10:40am–11:45am, in Merrill Academic Building, room 132

Instructor

Teaching assistant

  • Mariana Bessa
  • PhD student in Economics, UCSC

Office hours

Office hours are conducted in-person. Office hours are first-come-first-served: there is no need to sign up. Feel free to come to office hours to discuss concepts covered in the lectures and readings, discuss your research project, or talk about any other course-related matters:

  • Professor office hours: Wednesday, 3:00pm-4:00pm, in Engineering 2 Building, room 437
  • TA office hours: Friday, 1:00pm–3:00pm, in Engineering 2 Building, room 403B

GitHub Discussions

In addition to office hours, we will communicate using GitHub Discussions. This collaborative discussion forum is designed to get you help quickly and efficiently. To take full advantage of this communication channel, make sure to:

  • Create a free GitHub account. Several GitHub services are available to students for free, so sign up with your UCSC email address to benefit from those.
  • Watch the course repository to be notified when any new material is uploaded, new discussions are started, and new contributions are made to ongoing discussions.
  • Ask and answer questions, share updates, have open-ended conversations, and follow along on decisions affecting the course.

So, rather than sending emails, please post your questions and queries on GitHub, and participate whenever you can.

Homework

This is a flipped course, so at home you will watch lecture videos and read articles. Class time will be used to discuss the course material and to work on the research projects.

Schedule of lecture videos

At home, you will have to watch the following lecture videos:

The course's lecture videos are also available as a playlist on YouTube. The playlist might make it easier to watch the lectures and follow the course.

Schedule of readings

At home, you will also have to go over the following readings:

The main readings cover important material on which the lectures are based. You should read them from beginning to end, attempt to reproduce the key steps of the derivations, and remember the key results. Additional readings are also be provided in each section. These readings provide additional theoretical results, empirical evidence, some background, and may provide inspiration for your research. If you plan to do a PhD in economics, you are encouraged to go over the additional readings as well.

Schedule of sections

Sections will be devoted to solving multiple-choice quizzes based on lecture material. The quizzes will put the material from lecture into practice. Sections will cover the following material:

The quiz covered in section are designed to review and help assimilate the lecture material. This material provides the building blocks that you will use in your research project. As such, mastering the lecture material is key, and the section quizzes are here to help you do that.

Presentation of readings

Most Thursday class meetings will be devoted to discussing readings. To lead the discussion, students will give 10-minute presentations that summarize the readings for the week. Each student will give two reading presentations during the quarter. The presentations will be scheduled one week in advance.

Each presentation should have 6 slides addressing the following questions:

  1. CONTEXT: How does the paper relate to the lecture material? How does it contribute to the course material?
  2. QUESTION: What is the research question addressed by the paper?
  3. ANSWER: What are the main elements of the answer to the research question?
  4. POSITIONING: How does the material in the paper contribute to the previous literature?
  5. ILLUSTRATION: Illustrate graphically the answer to the research question or an interesting mechanism discussed in the paper.
  6. CONCLUSION: What are the limitations of the answer provided in the paper? How could the answer be improved?

Presentation slides must be written in LaTeX and compiled to a PDF. Slides should be submitted to Mariana by email before the date of the presentation.

Research paper

This is a research-intensive course which will serve as good preparation for students interested in pursuing further studies in macroeconomics, especially a PhD.

In this course you will shift away from learning the results of other peoples' research into learning how to conduct your own research. You will therefore devote a good part of the course to active research. You will learn:

  • How to select a research question
  • How to develop and refine the answer to your research question
  • How to position your paper in the literature

By the end of the course, you will have experienced all the stages of a research project and completed a short research paper on a topic related to unemployment.

Objective of the paper

A good research paper should do the following:

  • Develop a well-posed research question
  • Answer the research question using a combination of theory, simulations, and empirical analysis
  • Position the paper in the prior literature

The project will be evaluated based on quality of analysis, clarity, and originality.

More specifically, the final paper should follow standard guidelines for research papers:

  1. It should describe in details the research question you are answering, and explain why it is a relevant and important question.

  2. It should provide a thorough review of the prior literature, and it should explain how the paper contributes to and advances that literature.

  3. It should describe the model, tools, and data used to answer the questions.

  4. It should describe in details the main result obtained in the analysis.

    • For a theoretical analysis: use lemmas, propositions, proofs, and diagrams
    • For a numerical or empirical analysis: use tables and figures

  5. It should discuss the limitations of the current analysis, and how these will be addressed in the future.

Research teams

It might be difficult to complete a research paper in one quarter by oneself, which is why you will have the option to work on the research paper in a team of up to 4 students. Each team will choose a research topic, collaborate on the research project, give joint presentations, and jointly write the research paper. All members of the team will receive the same marks for the presentations and paper. The standards for the presentations and paper will be the same irrespective of the number of students in a team.

Most Tuesday class meetings will be devoted to team research.

Due dates

  • Tuesday 23 April/Thursday 25 April: class presentation of project outline
  • Tuesday 14 May/Thursday 16 May: class presentation of early results
  • Tuesday 4 June/Thursday 6 June: class presentation of final results
  • Thursday 13 June at noon: final paper due by email

Format of the presentations

The project outline should be presented in 10 minutes with 5 slides.

  • Slide 1: research question—what are you asking in the project & why that matters
  • Slide 2: positioning—what we already know & what we do not yet know
  • Slide 3: research methodology—how you will address the research question
  • Slides 4: overview of what you have so far—data & model & code
  • Slide 5: hurdles & next steps
  • It is fine to propose several possible projects.

Early and final results should be presented in 15 minutes with 7–8 slides.

  • Slide 1: review the research question & positioning of the project
  • Slides 2–4: overview of the data, model, & method
  • Slides 5–7: overview of the results
  • Slide 8: summary & next steps

Presentation slides must be written in LaTeX and compiled to a PDF. Slides should be submitted to Mariana by email before the date of the presentation.

Format of the paper

Your research paper should be short and follow the AER: Insights guidelines:

  • Manuscripts must be less than 6,000 words. The wordcount applies to the main body of the text, but excludes title page, reference list, and exhibits.
  • Manuscripts should contain no more than 5 exhibits (tables and figures). Individual exhibits are limited to one page each.
  • Manuscripts must include an abstract of 100 or fewer words.
  • Papers must be self-contained. Specifically, a reader should be able follow the analysis in the paper and be convinced it is correct and coherent from the main text alone, without consulting the appendix. For empirical work, the main text should include relevant information about data sources, variable definitions and construction, the estimating equations, and any other information needed to understand and assess each exhibit in the main text. For theoretical work, proofs should typically be contained in the paper. This is the case when the proof itself provides insight into the paper's argument or when the method of proof is innovative.

The research paper must be written in LaTeX, compiled to a PDF, and submitted to Mariana by email before the due date.

Grades

Your grade will be based on the quality of the research project and your participation in various course activities. The contribution to the total grade of 100 points is as follows:

  • Participation and general community building: 10 points
  • Answers to section quizzes: 15 points
  • Presentation of course reading: 15 points
  • Presentation of project outline: 10 points
  • Presentation of early results: 10 points
  • Presentation of final results: 10 points
  • Final paper: 30 points

Letter grades will be computed based on your total grade using a standard curve.

You will be able to find your grades in the Canvas gradebook.

Math resources

The course relies on basic mathematical methods such as unconstrained and constrained optimization, and linear and nonlinear differential equations—including phase diagrams.

So you are expected to have good command of this material. Appropriate courses in the department of Applied Mathematics will provide a great preparation for the course. In additional, a good reference for the material used in the course is Essential Mathematics for Economic Analysis, by K. Sydsaeter, P. Hammond, A. Strom, and A. Carvajal.

See also these lecture notes for a review of the material—although not everything covered in these notes is required for the course.

Writing resources

There is no textbook for this course, but several books might be helpful to write your research paper.

First and foremost, a good research paper needs to have a good structure. A good reference on how to structure your paper is The Little Book of Research Writing by V. Chaubey.

Scientific papers involve an elements that does not appear in other writings but is fundamental to communicate scientific ideas: graphs. It is important to make clear, clean, and meaningful graphs. A great reference on how to create compelling graphs is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by E.R. Tufte.

Once your paper has a good structure and good graphs, it does not hurt to have a decent style—to help readers go through the paper. The canonical reference on style is The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E. B. White.

Whatever you write, it is important to follow the rules and conventions of the English language. The canonical manual—followed by most US journals—is the Chicago Manual of Style. You should consult it if you have any question about English writing, rules, conventions, and style.

LaTeX resources

LaTeX is the best system to typeset scientific research. In particular, it allows to typeset mathematical expressions, insert tables and figures with results, and manage scientific references. This is why you are asked to write your presentation slides and research paper in LaTeX. If you continue on a research path, you will need to use LaTeX, so it is good to learn how to use it now.

LaTeX templates are available on GitHub to help you write your presentations and research paper:

These templates follow typographical best practices and have a minimalist design. You can also use these LaTeX commands in conjunction with the templates to obtain mathematical expressions that are more legible.

If you are new to LaTeX, feel free to use Overleaf, for which UCSC supplies professional accounts. Overleaf makes it easy to produce research paper and research presentations in LaTeX directly from your web browser. You can use the templates with Overleaf.