Master 2

Unité avancée au choix dans le domaine de spécialisation Économie théorique

Semestre : S2

Volume horaire : 24h

ECTS : 3

Localisation : Campus Jourdan

Enseignant : Roger GUESNERIE

The course starts with a reminder of crises in the recent or less recent past. The introductory emphasis is put on the recent 2008 crisis and a discussion of questions for economic theory. Indeed, this course will put a special attention on the issue of expectational coordination and will attempt to provide a critical assessment of the “rational expectations hypothesis” that has come to dominate theoretical economic modelling.

Lecture 2 comes back on the basic references of economic theory, the static Arrow-Debreu model (the French garden) and its inter-temporal version (the British garden). One also sheds a first light on the problems of expectational coordination, by discussing the existence of durable bubbles.

Lecture 3 goes further in exploring the surroundings of the “garden”. It provides an overview of the present explanations of temporary bubbles. Again the questions of information transmission and of the quality of expectations come into the picture.

Lecture 4 presents an overview of the history of money and banking and then provides a series of theoretical insights on liquidity and crisis which reflect both the agency theory and the expectations formation viewpoints.

Lecture 5 selected tools for an "eductive" approach to the study of expectational coordination. The tools may derived from game theoretical premises (rationalizability), or from a simple intuition on the stability of beliefs around an equilibrium. “Eductive” coordination in an "economic" context in which final agents are numerous and concerned with aggregate variables, is compared with the alternative approach of “adaptive” learning, both in finite and infinite horizon contexts.

Lecture 6 gives up the park around the garden to enter metaphorically the jungle, i.e the study of the stock market. An attempt is made to compare facts with the views drawn from the toolbox of standard models.

Lecture 7 comes back to some problems in finance (like the efficient market hypothesis) or in macroeconomics (like the connections between price adjustments and expectations).