Nber Macroeconomics Annual 2013

The twenty-eighth edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues its tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. As in previous years, this volume not only addresses recent developments in macroeconomics, but also takes up important policy-relevant questions and opens new debates that will continue for years to come. The first two papers in this year’s issue tackle fiscal and monetary policy, asking how interest rates and inflation can remain low despite fiscal policy behavior that appears inconsistent with a monetary policy regime focused only on inflation and output and not on fiscal balances as recently observed in the U.S. The third examines the implications of reference-dependent preferences and moral hazard in employment fluctuations in the labor market. The fourth paper addresses money and inflation, analyzing the long run inflation rate, the coexistence of money with pledgeable and money-like assets, and why inflation did not increase in response to business-cycle fluctuations in productivity. And the fifth looks at the stock market and how it relates to the real economy. The final chapter discusses the large and public shift towards more expansionary monetary policy that has recently occurred in Japan.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents pioneering work in macroeconomics by leading academic researchers to an audience of public policymakers and the academic community. Each commissioned paper is followed by comments and discussion. This year's edition provides a mix of cutting-edge research and policy analysis on such topics as productivity and information technology, the increase in wealth inequality, behavioral economics, and inflation.

We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.

The twenty-seventh edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues a tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical contributions that shed light on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics, pushing the frontiers of macroeconomic research on topics related to both the business cycle and economic growth and addressing important policy-relevant questions. This year's volume features two papers that illuminate two causes of the recent financial crisis: how firms accessed credit during the financial crisis and how the risk in mortgage lending was measured in the UK in the decades before the crisis. Other papers in this volume include a study of individual prices over time that draws out the implications of observed price adjustment for macroeconomic models of price stickiness, a focus on the implications of microeconomic estimates of labor supply for the determination of employment rates, a study of the empirical validity of the Keynesian explanation for employment declines during recessions, and an innovative paper that measures the efficacy of fiscal stimulus by looking at the economic impact of changes in federal highway spending across US states.

The twenty-sixth edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues its tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical contributions that shed light on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics, pushing the frontiers of macroeconomic work in areas ranging from short-run macroeconomic fluctuations to exchange rates, financial regulation, and political economy. As with other recent volumes in this series, this year's volume features several papers that aim to illuminate the causes of the recent financial crisis and consider policies that might reduce the likelihood of similar crises in the future. Topics include analyses of the sources of asset market bubbles and their macroeconomic consequences, the reconsideration of financial regulation and ways in which it could be improved, exchange-rate determination, and the macroeconomic determinants of unemployment.

Current issues in macroeconomics.

This year, the NBER Macroeconomics Annual celebrates its thirtieth volume. The first two papers examine China’s macroeconomic development. “Trends and Cycles in China's Macroeconomy” by Chun Chang, Kaiji Chen, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha outlines the key characteristics of growth and business cycles in China. “Demystifying the Chinese Housing Boom” by Hanming Fang, Quanlin Gu, Wei Xiong, and Li-An Zhou constructs a new house price index, showing that Chinese house prices have grown by ten percent per year over the past decade. The third paper, “External and Public Debt Crises” by Cristina Arellano, Andrew Atkeson, and Mark Wright, asks why there appear to be large differences across countries and subnational jurisdictions in the effect of rising public debts on economic outcomes. The fourth, “Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration” by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr, explains how the network structure of the US economy propagates the effect of gross output productivity shocks across upstream and downstream sectors. The fifth and sixth papers investigate the usefulness of surveys of household’s beliefs for understanding economic phenomena. “Expectations and Investment,” by Nicola Gennaioli, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, demonstrates that a chief financial officer's expectations of a firm's future earnings growth is related to both the planned and actual future investment of that firm. “Declining Desire to Work and Downward Trends in Unemployment and Participation” by Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura shows that an increasing number of prime-age Americans who are not in the labor force report no desire to work and that this decline accelerated during the second half of the 1990s.

The 20th NBER Macroeconomics Annual, covering questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to current policy debates.

The basic tools for analyzing macroeconomic fluctuations and policies, applied to concrete issues and presented within an integrated New Keynesian framework. This textbook presents the basic tools for analyzing macroeconomic fluctuations and policies and applies them to contemporary issues. It employs a unified New Keynesian framework for understanding business cycles, major crises, and macroeconomic policies, introducing students to the approach most often used in academic macroeconomic analysis and by central banks and international institutions. The book addresses such topics as how recessions and crises spread; what instruments central banks and governments have to stimulate activity when private demand is weak; and what “unconventional” macroeconomic policies might work when conventional monetary policy loses its effectiveness (as has happened in many countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession.). The text introduces the foundations of modern business cycle theory through the notions of aggregate demand and aggregate supply, and then applies the theory to the study of regular business-cycle fluctuations in output, inflation, and employment. It considers conventional monetary and fiscal policies aimed at stabilizing the business cycle, and examines unconventional macroeconomic policies, including forward guidance and quantitative easing, in situations of “liquidity trap”—deep crises in which conventional policies are either ineffective or have very different effects than in normal time. This book is the first to use the New Keynesian framework at the advanced undergraduate level, connecting undergraduate learning not only with the more advanced tools taught at the graduate level but also with the large body of policy-oriented research in academic journals. End-of-chapter problems help students master the materials presented.