Macroeconomics is a general branch of economics which studies the behavior of larger economic entities like countries. Macroeconomists often analyze time series of country specific data (e.g. inflation, output, unemployment) to understand economic relationships. The application of statistics, specifically econometrics, to macroeconomic questions is called macroeconometrics.
Macroeconomics is a general branch of economics which studies the behavior of larger economic entities like countries. Famous topics include the study of economic growth, business cycles, job markets and many more. Nowadays most macroeconomic models are built on the microeconomic foundations, i.e. individuals' and firms' behavior are modeled directly to then make predictions about the larger macroeconomic implications.
Macroeconomics in the past has mainly made use of time-series statistical methods like vector autoregression, error correction or ARIMA models. Whilst these remain important statistical tools for macroeconomists as well as more recent methods like MCMC models, more attention has been devoted to the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics in empirical work. Therefore also many microeconometric models are now used to test the predictions of macroeconomic models or to see how macroeconomic effects (like changes in the interest rate) affect smaller economic entities. This allows to circumvent the typical problems of macroeconometric analyses like small sample sizes or certain aggregation issues of the data.
