2025 Exam #1

Grade translation: add 12 points (30% of the points if you are doing percentages) as a bonus for it being a hard test. That means quite a few people are above 100%. A hard exam gives students a chance to really show what they can do!

More precisely, although in reality this exam is only a fraction of your grade, if I had to make course grades based on only the raw score before that addition, here’s what I would do:

A 32–39

A- 29–31

B+ 27–28

B 26

B- 24–25

C+ 22–23

C 19–21

C- 16–18

If you are still concerned about your performance after adding 12 points or 30% and looking at the more precise translation, come talk to me. My office hours are 10:15 to 11:00 MWF (before class) and 3:00-3:30 W.

Main Practice Exam (that you should take before class on Monday, February 10)

Note: The Shell will tell you which of your blog post reading assignments will have questions on the exam.

Special Note: On Exam 2 (not Exam 1) I will have some questions asking you to interpret one or more monetary policy articles from the Wall Street Journal. They usually appear at the top of the second page and appear almost every day.

Plan to do this practice exam on the February 10-11 weekend. You need to time yourself! Try to do it in 50 minutes just as if it were a real exam. Once the 50 minutes are up, then take all the time you want to try to get more questions, without looking at the answers. Only then should you look at the answers.

Exercises and Handouts to Help You Prepare for the Exam

  1. Make sure you have read “The Logarithmic Harmony of Percent Changes and Growth Rates"

  2. Growth Rates and Percentage Changes Powerpoint File

  3. Growth Rates and the Rule of 70 (.doc download)

  4. MV=PY, or equivalently %ΔM+%ΔV=%ΔP+%ΔY

  5. Cobb-Douglas with Constant Returns to Scale Exercise

  6. Returns to Scale Exercise (This semester you won’t need this exercise for an exam until Exam 2)

  7. %ΔQ = elasticity %ΔP; %Δ (PQ) = %ΔP+%ΔQ

  8. Supply and Demand: Elasticities and Comparative Statics

  9. Rule of 70 Exercise

  10. Comparative Statics in a Long-Run Model Exercise (unlikely to be on this exam, since we haven’t covered them yet)

Readings for the Exam

  1. Government Purchases vs. Government Spending

  2. America's Big Monetary Policy Mistake: How Negative Interest Rates Could Have Stopped the Great Recession in Its Tracks

  3. Governments Can and Should Beat Bitcoin at Its Own Game

  4. Optimal Monetary Policy: Could the Next Big Idea Come from the Blogosphere?

  5. Why Housing is So Expensive

  6. Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation—Reporting on the Work of D'Amico, Glaeser, Gyourko, Kerr & Ponzetto (my retitling—don’t be surprised when you see a different title at this link)

  7. When the Government Says ‘You May Not Have a Job’

  8. The Logarithmic Harmony of Percent Changes and Growth Rates

  9. The Shape of Production: Charles Cobb's and Paul Douglas's Boon to Economics

  10. Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz: Self-Driving Cars, Tolls, and Carpooling are Much More Powerful as a Combination than Separately

  11. How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector as a Partial Alternative to Government: A Reader’s Guide (You only need to read the part that is above the title “Core Argument.” The part after that is mostly a bibliography.)

Extra Practice Exams

2022

2020

2019

2018

2017