Martin Eichenbaum - Böcker

The thirty-first edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. The first two papers are rigorous and data-driven analyses of the European financial crisis. The third paper introduces a new set of facts about economic growth and financial ratios as well as a new macrofinancial database for the study of historical financial booms and busts. The fourth paper studies the historical effects of Federal Reserve efforts to provide guidance about the future path of the funds rate. The fifth paper explores the distinctions between models of price setting and associated nominal frictions using data on price setting behavior. The sixth paper considers the possibility that the economy displays nonlinear dynamics that lead to cycles rather than long-term convergence to a steady state.  The volume also includes a short paper on the decline in the rate of global economic growth.

Volume 32 of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features six theoretical and empirical studies of important issues in contemporary macroeconomics, and a keynote address by former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard. In one study, SeHyoun Ahn, Greg Kaplan, Benjamin Moll, Thomas Winberry, and Christian Wolf examine the dynamics of consumption expenditures in non-representative-agent macroeconomic models. In another, John Cochrane asks which macro models most naturally explain the post-financial-crisis macroeconomic environment, which is characterized by the co-existence of low and nonvolatile inflation rates, near-zero short-term interest rates, and an explosion in monetary aggregates. Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino examine the causes of the lending boom that precipitated the recent U.S. financial crisis and Great Recession. Steven Durlauf and Ananth Seshadri investigate whether increases in income inequality cause lower levels of economic mobility and opportunity. Charles Manski explores the formation of expectations, considering the efficacy of directly measuring beliefs through surveys as an alternative to making the assumption of rational expectations. In the final research paper, Efraim Benmelech and Nittai Bergman analyze the sharp declines in debt issuance and the evaporation of market liquidity that coincide with most financial crises. Blanchard’s keynote address discusses which distortions are central to understanding short-run macroeconomic fluctuations.

This volume contains six studies on current topics in macroeconomics. The first shows that while assuming rational expectations is unrealistic, a finite-horizon forward planning model can yield results similar to those of a rational expectations equilibrium. The second explores the aggregate risk of the U.S. financial sector, and in particular whether it is safer now than before the 2008 financial crisis. The third analyzes “factorless income,” output that is not measured as capital or labor income. Next, a study argues that the financial crisis increased the perceived risk of a very bad economic and financial outcome, and explores the propagation of large, rare shocks. The next paper documents the substantial recent changes in the manufacturing sector and the decline in employment among prime-aged Americans since 2000. The last paper analyzes the dynamic macroeconomic effects of border adjustment taxes.

The thirty-fourth volume of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical studies of issues in contemporary macroeconomics and a keynote address by James Stock, a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2014. Chong-en Bai, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Zheng Song examine the “special deals” provided by Chinese local governments to favored private firms and their effects on economic growth. Matias Covarrubias, Germán Gutiérrez, and Thomas Philippon study the evolution of profits, investment, and market shares in US industries over the past forty years and find evidence of inefficient concentration and barriers to entry since 2000. David Debortoli, Jordi Galí, and Luca Gambetti assess whether recent economic performance was affected by a binding zero lower bound constraint on the interest rate. Michael McLeay and Silvana Tenreyro explain why it is difficult to empirically identify the Phillips curve (a key element of the policy framework used by central banks) using aggregate data. The authors suggest using regional variation in unemployment and inflation to estimate the relationship between these variables. Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Fang Yang examine the effects of shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages for white, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s on labor supply and retirement savings. Nir Jaimovich, Sergio Rebelo, Arlene Wong, and Miao Ben Zhang investigate the role that increases in the quality of the goods consumed (“trading up”) played in the rise of the skill premium that occurred in the last four decades.

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2020 presents research by leading scholars on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. George-Marios Angeletos, Zhen Huo, and Karthik Sastry ask how to model expectations without rational expectations. They find that in response to business cycle shocks, expectations underreact initially but eventually overshoot, which in their view favors models with dispersed, noisy information and overextrapolation of expectations. Next, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Nicholas Trachter contrast the patterns of rising aggregate firm market concentration with falling market concentration over time at the local level. Some associate rising concentration with less competition and more market power, but because most product markets are local, studying changes in local competition, as opposed to trends in aggregate competition, provides important insights. Adam Guren, Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson develop a novel econometric procedure to recover structural parameters using cross-region variation, for example, to estimate direct effects of housing wealth changes on individual household consumption. To avoid confounding direct and indirect effects, the authors isolate the direct effect of house price changes on consumption by using other estimates of demand multipliers from the local government spending literature to deflate estimates of the total effect of local consumption on local house prices. Peter Klenow and Huiyu Li examine the sources of reduced productivity growth by quantifying the contribution of innovation to economic growth. They find that young firms generate roughly half the productivity growth, most of the changes in productivity during the mid-1990s are accounted for by older firms, and most growth results from quality improvements on incumbents’ own products. In the fifth chapter, Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song use detailed micro panel data from the Social Security Administration to assess the progress women have made into the top 1% and top 0.1% of the income distribution over time. Finally, Joachim Hubmer, Per Krusell, and Anthony Smith Jr. explore the reasons for growing wealth inequality across the developed world. They argue that the significant drop in tax progressivity starting in the late 1970s was the most important source of growing wealth inequality in the United States. The sharp observed increases in earnings inequality and the falling labor share cannot account for the bulk of the increase in wealth inequality.

Authoritative takes on the most current and pressing issues in macroeconomics today.The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for leading economists to participate in important debates in macroeconomics and to report on major developments in macroeconomic analysis and policy.The NBER Macroeconomics Annual brings together leading scholars to discuss five research papers on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. First, Andrea Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato, and Mindy Xiaolan document the rise of a new class of worker that receives part of its labor income as equity-based compensation, its role in the recent decline in the labor share of income, and implications for the returns to skilled labor and the implied capital-skill complementarity. Next, Michael Bauer and Eric Swanson focus on monetary policy shocks and argue the correlation between estimated monetary surprises and previously available information can be explained by uncertainty about the parameters of the monetary policy rule. Using new data and methods they find effects of monetary policy on macroeconomic variables that are much larger than previously estimated. Job Boerma and Loukas Karabarbounis provide a framework for quantitatively exploring the gap in wealth between White and Black Americans over the past 150 years and examine the effectiveness of reparations as a tool for closing this gap. Guido Menzio considers workers who do not have rational expectations, and whose “stubborn” beliefs change the response of wages to technology shocks, resulting in sticky wages. He finds that the larger the fraction of workers with stubborn beliefs, the more volatile unemployment is. Finally, Rishabh Aggarwal, Adrien Auclert, Matthew Rognlie, and Ludwig Straub investigate the growth—particularly in the United States—of private savings, current account deficits, and fiscal deficits after 2020. They argue that fiscal deficits lead to large and persistent increases in private savings and current account deficits.

Provides a forum for leading economists to participate in important debates in macroeconomics and to report on major developments in macroeconomic analysis and policy.The NBER Macroeconomics Annual features research by leading scholars on important issues in contemporary macroeconomics. David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff, Andreas Kostol, and Simon Mongey consider the importance of market power in the labor market and develop a theory of monopsony that incorporates worker-firm-specific preference heterogeneity, search frictions, and firm granularity. They apply this theory to analyze the effects of monopsony on wages, job flows, and welfare. Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, Fatih Karahan, and Ayşegül Şahin examine how supply chain disruptions and labor supply constraints contributed to the recent rise of inflation, recognizing their interactions with the shift of consumption from services to goods and expansionary monetary policy. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Christina Patterson explore the hypothesis that slow productivity growth stems from an unbalanced sectoral distribution of innovation—because innovation depends on complementary innovations among input suppliers, there can be rapid technological progress in a subset of inputs but slow productivity growth in the aggregate. Greg Buchak, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, and Amit Seru investigate two important margins of adjustment in credit markets—banks’ ability to sell loans and shadow bank activity—and argue that accounting for them is critical for analyzing how lending responds to economic or policy shocks and the way such shocks are amplified through financial intermediaries. Finally, Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta, Matthew O’Brien, and Andrei Shleifer demonstrate that overreaction of long-term profit expectations to reported profits could help reconcile Robert Shiller’s “excess volatility” puzzle with economic fluctuations more generally.