We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information and these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual...

In 2011, the International Monetary Fund invited prominent economists and economic policy makers to consider the brave new world of the post-crisis global economy. The result is a book that captures the state of macroeconomic thinking at a transformational moment. The crisis and the weak...

We explore this class of models for two reasons. The first is that it appears to capture many of the aspects often ascribed to fluctuations, the role of animal spirits in affecting demand---spirits that we interpret here as coming from a rational reaction to signals about the future---, the role...

A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since then. He is the Class of 1941...

The purpose of this lecture is to look beyond the complex events that characterize the global financial and economic crisis, identify the basic mechanisms, and infer the policies needed to resolve the current crisis, as well as the policies needed to reduce the probability of similar events in...

We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...

In a dynamically efficient economy, can a government roll its debt forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is negative, and may be...

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