The ABCs of RBCs is the first book to provide a basic introduction to Real Business Cycle (RBC) and New-Keynesian models. These models argue that random shocks—new inventions, droughts, and wars, in the case of pure RBC models, and monetary and fiscal policy and international investor risk aversion, in more open interpretations—can trigger booms and recessions and can account for much of observed output volatility.

George McCandless works through a sequence of these Real Business Cycle and New-Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models in fine detail, showing how to solve them, and how to add important extensions to the basic model, such as money, price and wage rigidities, financial markets, and an open economy. The impulse response functions of each new model show how the added feature changes the dynamics.

The ABCs of RBCs is designed to teach the economic practitioner or student how to build simple RBC models. Matlab code for solving many of the models is provided, and careful readers should be able to construct, solve, and use their own models.

In the tradition of the “freshwater” economic schools of Chicago and Minnesota, McCandless enhances the methods and sophistication of current macroeconomic modeling.

Economies are constantly in flux, and economists have long sought reliable means of analyzing their dynamic properties. This book provides a succinct and accessible exposition of modern dynamic (or intertemporal) macroeconomics. The authors use a microeconomics-based general equilibrium framework, specifically the overlapping generations model, which assumes that in every period there are two generations which overlap. This model allows the authors to fully describe economies over time and to employ traditional welfare analysis to judge the effects of various policies. By choosing to keep the mathematical level simple and to use the same modeling framework throughout, the authors are able to address many subtle economic issues. They analyze savings, social security systems, the determination of interest rates and asset prices for different types of assets, Ricardian equivalence, business cycles, chaos theory, investment, growth, and a variety of monetary phenomena.

Introduction to Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory will become a classic of economic exposition and a standard teaching and reference tool for intertemporal macroeconomics and the overlapping generations model. The writing is exceptionally clear. Each result is illustrated with analytical derivations, graphically, and by worked out examples. Exercises, which are strategically placed, are an integral part of the book.