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...

The characteristics that distinguish most developing countries, compared to large industrialized countries, include: greater exposure to supply shocks in general and trade volatility in particular, procyclicality of both domestic fiscal policy and international finance, lower credibility with...

Intro -- Contents -- Editorial -- Abstracts -- 1 Assessing Structural VARs -- 2 Volatility and Dispersion in Business Growth Rates: Publicly Traded versus Privately Held Firms -- 3 Do Taxes Explain European Employment? Indivisible Labor, Human Capital, Lotteries, and Savings -- 4 Fluctuating...

This paper reviews a variety of alternative approaches to the specification of the expectations of economic decisionmakers in dynamic models, and reconsiders familiar results in the theory of monetary and fiscal policy when one allows for departures from the hypothesis of rational expectations....

The article presents a temporary equilibrium framework for macroeconomic analysis that allows for a wide range of possible specifications of expectations but reduces to a standard new Keynesian model in the limiting case of rational expectations. This common framework is then used to contrast...