Macroeconomics – an MBA course at Said Business School

A core course taken in the second term
8 lectures
Examined by Final exam (100%)

Post course thoughts
Macroeconomics is one of the subjects MBA students tend to think they shouldn’t have to take. They throw their hands in the air and say ‘there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s not important’. A few months after this course I got into a discussion with a classmate about exchange rates, interest rates, the strength of the dollar and a few other things. Shortly afterward the classmate said something along the lines of “hey, I never realised how much I learned in Macro before”. It’s one of those background knowledge subjects that informs everything else you learn. Studying business without Macroeconomics is like studying biology without ever going outside, you can do it, but its not the best way of doing things.

So what do you learn? Well if you come to Oxford you don’t learn the standard toolkit. You kick off with the Solow model of economic growth and then segue into a bunch of other stuff. It was week five before we learned about money (work prior to this focused on ‘potato economies’. The reason for introducing money was that it makes understanding inflation a lot easier.

While plenty of people found the course hard going a lot found it interesting. Examples were drawn mostly from the developing world and east Asia. The governor of the central bank of Argentina came along to tell us about the dangers of inflation. Personally I really liked the course, I’ve studied economics ‘the traditional way’ before and found this approach very stimulating and eye-opening. It also tallied nicely with what Joseph Stiglitz (he of the nobel prize) had to say when he gave a series of public lectures.

Oxford is good at Macroeconomics, and I think it showed.