The persistently low and (partly) negative output growth in Germany in 2019 evoked memories of the recent global economic crisis and, by this, sparked debates about measures to counter the growing number of unemployed, for example changing the generosity of unemployment benefits (UB) and...

Milton Friedman's contributions to and influence on macroeconomics are discussed, beginning with his work on the consumption function and the demand for money, not to mention monetary history, which helped to undermine the post World War 2 Keynesian consensus in the area. His inter-related...

We provide evidence on the stories that people tell to explain a historically notable rise in inflation using samples of experts, U.S. households, and managers. We document substantial heterogeneity in narratives about the drivers of higher inflation rates. Experts put more emphasis on...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

This paper investigates recent developments in meta-analysis, the tool to quantitatively synthesize research in a certain body of literature. After providing a brief overview on how to do a meta-analysis and discussing recent methodological advancements in the field, I review applied...

The theory and practice of stabilization policy has taken many turns as it evolved over the past century, oscillating between high hopes and deep skepticism regarding the capacity - and desirability - of governments taking responsibility for macroeconomic stability. This paper reviews the...

Banking system stress tests are a key component of IMF/World Bank financial stability assessments.

Cogley and Sargent provide us with a very useful tool for empirical macroeconomics: a Gibbs sampler for the estimation of VARs with drifting coefficients and volatilities. The authors apply the tool to a VAR with three variables-inflation, unemployment, and the nominal interest rate-and two...

The authors consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second,...

The authors study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the United States caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. They use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2002), augmented with...