The Financial Crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession in its wake, have shaken up macroeconomics. The paradigm of the "New" Neoclassical Synthesis, which seemed to provide a robust framework of analysis for short-run macro not long ago, fails to capture key elements of the recent crisis. This...

The present paper describes recent research on two central themes of Keynes' General Theory: (i) the social waste associated with recessions, and (ii) the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a stabilization tool. The paper also discusses some evidence on the extent to which fiscal policy has been...