Teaching: from Microeconomics to Open-economy macro

Question

I am a new faculty teaching MBA courses. Presently, I am teaching International Financial Management (IFM) and Macroeconomics. I have prepared the syllabus of macroeconomics based on first 9 chapters of the core module in "Macroeconomics, Blanchard and Johnson, 6/E, Pearson, 2017, 9789332587601". The idea is to keep mathematical exposition to the minimum while building a base for the discussion of open-economy macroeconomics based on chapter 20 & 21 in the above-mentioned book during IFM course.

I would also be teaching microeconomics.

1. How do I form the syllabus for microeconomics to support my teaching of Macroeconomics and IFM while focusing on intuition rather than extensive mathematical exposition? Suggest some appropriate textbooks for this purpose.
2. Any suggestions to enhance my research (maybe in Macro-Finance) based on the teaching of above subjects.

Answer 1

This is for Micro, entirely based on my own opinion and experience.

Syllabus:

The most useful topics would be those on production and cost and perfect competition. I see no point of talking about utility theory unless you will be covering intertemporal choice. This and basic demand-supply. If you will be covering ISLM, you might find it a good idea to discuss "shifting a curve versus moving along a curve" with demand-supply prior to moving to ISLM.

Books:
I personally find useful The Applied Theory of Price by Deirdre McCloskey. The math (read calculus) was usually in the footnotes or appendix and I really did not need calculus to cover almost all of the standard chapters - Consumer Behavior, Perfect Competition, Monopoly etc. The exposition was intuition based.

However, having used this book as an instructor, I personally needed to actually read and work through the examples before teaching it to my students - some of them could require a bit of very careful thinking.

The book is available on the author's webpage: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/books/index.php

Depending on how much calculus you want to show your students, other open source books on micro could be the one by McAfee https://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/ and the one by Yoram Bauman (can't find the link to it)