This short, concrete, and to-the-point book guides students through this vast field of conflicting opinions. The book begins with the premise that students benefit most from seeing a balanced treatment of all available views. For instance, it provides coverage of both ad hoc and optimizing models and also explores divisions such as flexible price versus sticky price models, rationality versus irrationality, and calibration versus statistical inference. By giving consideration to each of these "mini debates," this book shows how each approach has its good and bad points.
International Macroeconomics and Finance also excels in its integration of theoretical and empirical issues: the theory is introduced by developing the canonical model in a topic area and then its predictions are evaluated quantitatively. Bot the calibration method and standard econometric methods are covered. To avoid the "black-box" perception that students sometimes develop, almost all of the results presented here are derived step-by-step from first principles. A conversational, logical presentation also makes this a supreme learning tool.