Macroeconomics: Business Cycles

ECON 205 is where macro stops being verbal storytelling about GDP and inflation and starts being agents solving intertemporal optimization problems whose aggregated choices give you business cycles, current account dynamics, and exchange rates. You'll spend the semester building up from the two-period consumption-saving model to full RBC and sticky-price frameworks, working through problem sets and lab exercises that ask you to actually derive equilibria rather than just describe them. It's the spring follow-up to ECON 204 and the foundation everything else in the macro track (monetary, international, growth) assumes you've internalized, so the math habits you form here matter more than the specific models.