Estimating key macroeconomic relationships at the undergraduate level: Taylor rule and Okun’s Law examples

This paper presents some Excel-based exercises that allow students to estimate some key macroeconomic relationships: Okun's Law and the Taylor rule. The Okun's law exercise has the additional benefit of providing estimates for long-run GDP growth. The Taylor rule exercises give students the opportunity to replicate, and then improve upon a seminal paper in macroeconomics. Overall, these exercises give students an introduction to some key aspects of conducting empirical research in macroeconomics, including manipulating models into a form that can be estimated and gathering and manipulating data. In addition, the exercises provide students with useful spreadsheet skills that can be used in other assignments and other arenas, long after graduation.