[zissou]

I thinks it's great that 2 well known economists with household names in the academy have taken to marketing programming to economists. I just wish they would have called this venture something other than Quantitative Economics when they launched it last year. It's not that it's the wrong name, it is just misleading.

A better name would have been Quantitative Macroeconomics, because that is clearly the target market. Yes, I know there are some generic topics in there like Linear Algebra that both micro and macro economists could use, but it's not like there is a lack of numpy and scipy examples on the Internet.

[imanuelcostigan]

Job search is not macro..it's micro

[dbecker]

There are applications of job search in both micro and macro (I happen to have written a PhD dissertation involving a micro approach to job search).

The treatment in the book we are discussing is decidedly macro, and looks generally similar to the treatment in a previous Sargent book titled "Recursive Macroeconomic Theory."

[zissou]

What are you talking about? Did you even look at their section on job search? It is most definitely a macro application.

Disregarding the fact that job search is a subtopic of unemployment, one of the main concepts in macro, you'll notice their model parameters are human capital, investment, and wage. The only quasi micro flavor of that model is search effort as these variables will almost always be in equilibrium based on some kind of an optimal stopping rule. Whether that rule has to do with finding a new job or discovering information about, say, the prices in the market dictates whether it would be a micro or macro use case. Again, if you actually looked at the model, their optimal stopping rule is when the person finds another job. And once again, the idea of jobs are the main ingredient in the concept of unemployment.... a macro topic. Not to mention, whether or not I'm searching for a job dictates whether I'm factored into the unemployment rate or not.

So..... yeah, job search is definitely not micro.