Guillermo Calvo, one of the most influential macroeconomists of the last thirty years, has made pathbreaking contributions in such areas as time-inconsistency, lack of credibility, stabilization, transition economies, debt maturity, capital flows, and financial crises. His work on macroeconomic issues relevant for developing countries has set the tone for much of the research in this area and greatly influenced practitioners' thinking in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
An important recent advancement in macroeconomics is the development of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) macromodels. The use of DSGE models to study monetary policy, however, has led to paradoxical and puzzling results on a number of central monetary issues including price determinacy and liquidity effects.
Currency boards, more so than other exchange rate regimes, have come in and out of fashion. Defined by a fixed exchange rate with full convertibility, central bank liabilities backed with foreign exchange reserves, and a high cost of exiting the regime, currency boards were common in colonial times—until most were cast off as countries gained independence after World War II.
Over the last thirty years, a new paradigm in banking theory has overturned economists' traditional vision of the banking sector. The asymmetric information model, extremely powerful in many areas of economic theory, has proven useful in banking theory both for explaining the role of banks in the economy and for pointing out structural weaknesses in the banking sector that may justify government intervention.
The core mechanism that drives economic growth in modern market economies is massive microeconomic restructuring and factor reallocation—the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" by which new technologies replace the old. At the microeconomic level, restructuring is characterized by countless decisions to create and destroy production arrangements. The efficiency of these decisions depends in large part on the existence of sound institutions that provide a proper transactional environment.
The NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics brings together leading American and European economists to discuss a broad range of current issues in global macroeconomics. An international companion to the more American-focused NBER Macroeconomics Annual, the 2005 volume first explores macroeconomic issues of interest to all advanced economies, then analyzes topical questions concerning the eastward expansion of the European Monetary Union.
This 21st edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual treats many questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to current policy debates. The first four papers and discussions focus on such current macroeconomic issues as how structural-vector-autoregressions help identify sources of business cycle fluctuations and the evolution of U.S. macroeconomic policies. The last two papers analyze theoretical developments in optimal taxation policy and equilibrium yield curves.
The NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics brings together leading American and European economists to discuss a broad range of current issues in global macroeconomics. An international companion to the more American-focused NBER Macroeconomics Annual, this particular volume offers cutting-edge research on monetary and fiscal policy responses to macroeconomic fluctuations, with special emphasis on tailoring a single monetary policy for the diverse economies that make up the European Monetary Union.
Public economics studies how government taxing and spending activities affect the economy—economic efficiency and the distribution of income and wealth. This comprehensive text in public economics covers the core topics market failure and taxation as well as recent developments in the political economy and public choice literatures. It is unique not only in its broad scope but in its balance between public finance and public choice and its combination of theory and relevant empirical evidence.
This 20th edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual treats many questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to current policy debates. The papers and discussions include an analysis of the differential between American and European unemployment rates, with the authors of the paper taking issue with Edward Prescott's view that higher European tax rates are responsible; a provocative account of the relationship between fluctuations in the hiring rate of new workers and the U.S.
