This paper traces the evolution of macroeconomic events and ideas from the late 1940s to the present day. After a brief introduction that highlights the unique features of the main macroeconomic variables as compared to their behavior before 1947, the paper turns to an analysis of four main...

Theoretical advances in macroeconomics made in the last three decades have had a major influence on macroeconomic policy analysis. Moreover, over the last several decades, the United States and other countries have undertaken a variety of policy changes that are precisely what macroeconomic...

What can macroeconomic history offer macroeconomic theorists and macroeconometricians? Macroeconomic history offers more than longer time series or special `controlled experiments.' It suggests an historical definition of the economy, which has implications for macroeconometric methods. The...

Recently, research on the causes of the Great Depression has shifted from a heavy emphasis on events in the United States to a broader, more comparative approach that examines the interwar experiences of many countries simultaneously. In this lecture I survey the current state of our knowledge...

The 1980s were both the lost decade of growth for much of Latin America and Africa, and the period in which -- through the new growth theory -- macroeconomists returned to the study of growth and development. The new growth theory is production function driven and concerned primarily with steady...

The paper surveys the macroeconomic literature of the last decade with emphasis on the implications of the New Classical and Rational Expectations critiques for the Keynesian paradigm and the role of macro policies. This is done on the background of the main macro developments of the l970'a and...

This paper uses the Blanchard (1985) finite horizon model to study how taxes and government spending can be managed to stabilize aggregate demand. It is shown that tax policy cannot stabilize demand in less time than it stabilizes the public debt, but that, if government spending is the...

The paper reviews the directions of research that offer important insights into open economy macroeconomic policy: pricing, waiting and expectations. The pricing discussion centers on the recognition that firms are price setters. This implies that industry shocks such as exchange rate movements...