This paper reports on the current status of the microeconomic research on labor supply behavior. The purpose is to direct attention to microeconomic research that may be helpful in the continuing evaluation of aggregate models designed to explain the dynamic behavior of wages, employment and...

This paper examines what industrial organization economists know and don't know about how markets clear. It reviews the empirical evidence which shows that, at least for some industries, price behavior is peculiar with prices failing to adjust over long periods of time. The paper discusses...

An emerging consensus on the future of macroeconomics views the incorporation of a role for financial intermediation, labor market frictions, and household heterogeneity in the presence of uninsurable unemployment risk as key needed extensions to the benchmark macro framework. I argue that this...

In the presence of principal-agent problems, published macroeconomic forecasts by professional economists may not measure expectations. Forecasters may use their forecasts in order to manipulate beliefs about their ability. I test a cross-sectional implication of models of reputation and...

The last decade has seen a burst of micro price studies. Many studies analyze data underlying national CPIs and PPIs. Others focus on more granular sub-national grocery store data. We review these studies with an eye toward the role of price setting in business cycles. We summarize with ten...

This paper aims to provide a swift tour of the economic issues presented by vouchers and thus to fill an apparent gap in the literature for a basic survey of the subject. Among the issues it considers are: factors determining a voucher's cash-equivalence; reasons (such as paternalism,...

This paper is a review of rational expectations models used in macroeconomic research. The purpose is to examine in some detail the differences between the models, the advantages and disadvantages of alternative models the empirical support for the models and their policy implications. The main...

This essay offers a brief history of macroeconomics, together with an evaluation of what has been learned over the past several decades. It is based on the premise that the field has evolved through the efforts of two types of macroeconomist%u2014 those who understand the field as a type of...

The role of inventories in making prices "sticky" is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear-quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand, but able to store its finished goods in inventory. It is shown that, in contrast to the usual presumption, firms that exhibit the smallest...

This paper presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions from surveys conducted since 1968 by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Statistical Association. The tests of the joint...