• Students can use macroeconomic theory to understand what determines intertemporal consumption and savings decisions, and can communicate the main insights, both with accuracy and intuition.
• Students can understand theoretical work published in scientific journals, reflect upon the underlying model, and discuss the findings.
• Students can formulate and analyze research questions with the help of the appropriate model and are capable to go further with economic model building.

• Understand the intertemporal constraints of economic agents and set up their constrained optimization problems by applying the method of Lagrange. Explore the arguments put forward verbally, graphically, and mathematically.
• Solve for the constrained optimal behavior of economic agents and analyze how it depends on interest rates, subsidies, taxes, and wages.
• Identify the crucial assumptions of the standard macroeconomic intertemporal decision theory and discuss the implications for consumption behavior.
• Formulate well-defined decision problems (with the required degree of formalism) and apply the Lagrange optimization method to derive the optimality conditions for these problems.

• Recall the theoretical models used to analyze various decision problems (see course content)

Course Content (same as in the KS)

1. Intertemporal Consumption and Saving
2. Labor and Leisure choice
3. Investment and Tobin’s Q
4. General Equilibrium