RyanBanerjee

Primary: International Finance, Macroeconomics and Econometrics
Secondary: Computational Economics and Development

Link to my all my job market information

Essay 1 Which Countries Receive Aid as Insurance and Why? A Theory of Optimal Aid Policy[Job Market Paper]

Link to a Mind Map of my job market paper

Essay 2 New evidence on the relationship between aid cyclicality and institutions

Essay 3 Optimal Procyclical Fiscal Policy Without Procyclical Government Spending

Here is some Python code I wrote which solves the model in Phelan and Townsend (1991), "Computing Multi-Period Information-Constrained Optima", Review of Economic Studies. multiPeriod.py

The code makes use of the PuLP solver which makes writing linear programming problems a breeze. More...

Little bits of other people's code has saved me from re-inventing the wheel many times. For example the Hodrick-Prescott filter code for Python written by Alan Issac saved me having to re-write this.

This is my first contribution to the Python community, the Baxter-King Band Pass filter. Please feel free to use it. More...

It took me a bit of fiddling to work out how to access the econ department's server. SSH connections would not let me use terminal commands. I found that I could use sftp and scp to get conections. Here is how I did it using the commandline (no need to install anything like F-Secure). More...

Dynamic programming is the work horse of modern macroeconomics. The mathematical theory behind dynamic programming can be quite hard going. John Rust provides a concise overview in his Palgrave article. However, using dynamic programming on a computer to solve macroeconomic models is surprisingly easy. This mini-course was designed for graduate students in macroeconomics and international finance with some idea of dynamic programming.

I think this material can be used for advanced undergraduates interested in modern macroeconomics. I think the computer code could easily be used by an undergraduate student to write a final year disseration. More ...

Some useful cost of living calculations for prospective graduate students in economics at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP)

I calculate how much a fully funded economics graduate student at UMCP has available to spend from their stipend after paying: taxes, health insurance, mandatory university fees and rent. (Ask the graduate secretary/or current students for help with the figures, it should only take them 20mins or so to find the necessary data).

NOTE: As of Fall 2008, stipends have now substantially increased. At the request of the department I have removed the document from my website. I still recommend redoing this calculation to compare the real value of competing offers.

According to the OECD, latest edition of "Taxing Wages", employees face a higher tax wedge of 24.2% in the UK compared to only 21.7% in the US. These are of course average tax wedges. In the UK, the higher tax rates bite earlier so I wanted to compare what would be my income tax wedge given my low student income.

I find that my 'effective' tax wedge is actually lower in the UK, than in the US. In the UK my tax wedge is 16% compared to 19% in the US. I use the word 'effective' because I include health insurance payments in the US because I am not eligible for healthcare programs funded by the state. Excluding health insurance payments, my tax wedges in the UK and the US are roughly the same at 16%. More ...

I carefully compare the cost of living for a PhD student in the Washington DC area to another PhD student in London. I find that the real exchange rate is approximately 1.9 US Dollars per Pound Sterling. This is remarkably close to the prevailing market exchange rate and significantly higher than the real exchange rate derived in the Penn World Tables. My results suggest that comparisons about real incomes for low income households between the USA and the UK overestimate real incomes in the US relative to those in the UK.