Welcome

This site brings together resources to support the study of economics.

The problem sets available on this site and organized by topic, were selected and developed by Economics faculty in the Social Science Department as part of the OER grant project. 

Problems and questions are compiled from individual contributors and from the following sources:

1. Principles of Macroeconomics – adapted from a work produced and distributed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA) in 2011 by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution. This adapted edition is produced by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing through the eLearning Support Initiative.

2. Principles of Macroeconomics, Steven A. Greenlaw and David Shapiro, Open Stax College, 2017, Principles of Macroeconomics, 2e by OpenStax v4.0 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-macroeconomics-2e

3. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ 

4. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – Economic Data, https://www.bls.gov/ 

5. Welcome to Macroeconomics, Michael Parkin, 10^th Pearson Education Limited, 2007. 

6. Bureau of Economic Analysis: bea.gov

ECON 1101 (Macroeconomics) course learning outcomes and problem-solving questions that can be employed to assess the following learning goals:

• Demonstrate an understanding the basic economic decisions that underlie the economic process: What and how to produce goods and services and how they are distributed.
• Understand the concepts of scarcity, choice and opportunity cost and apply these concepts to the analysis of the workings of a market economy.
• Demonstrate a firm knowledge of the interrelationships among consumers, government, business and the rest of the world in the U.S. macroeconomy.
• Identify the process of how the nation’s output of goods and services is measured through the national income and product accounts; clearly comprehend the income and expenditure approaches to measuring national output and national income.
• Acquire the ability to clearly illustrate the specific roles and functions of monetary and fiscal policy in the economy and explain how these are applied to the process of shaping economic policy and stabilizing the economy, specifically with regard to controlling inflation, promoting full employment and facilitating economic growth.
• Explain the process of how fiscal policy is enacted and how its functions – taxation and spending – are designed to achieve the goals of equilibrium between Aggregate Demand and Supply; develop a firm understanding of the differences between, and the specific roles of, discretionary fiscal policy and automatic stabilizers in stabilizing employment, income, growth, and prices during periods of recession and economic expansion.
• Identify and analyze the role of the Federal Reserve System in setting monetary policy, and comprehend the objectives of the instruments used by the Federal Reserve to regulate the nation’s money supply (setting short term interest rates, conducting Open Market Operations and establishing bank reserves); develop the ability to distinguish the functions of these tools in controlling inflation, regulating the circulation of money in the economy, and promoting  economic and income growth.
• Develop an understanding of the impact of globalization on the U.S. economy particularly since the early 1970’s; examine the relationship between the changing structure of the U.S. macroeconomy and changes in U.S. and international trade policy; the impact on trade agreements of the decline of the U.S. manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy.