The Real Business Cycle (RBC) research program has grown specularly over the last decade, as its concepts and methods have diffused into mainstream macroeconomics. Yet, there is increasing skepticism that technology shocks are a major source of business fluctuations. This chapter exposits the...

Consumption is the largest component of GDP. Since the 1950s, the life cycle and the permanent income models have constituted the main analytical tools to the study of consumption behaviour, both at the micro and at the aggregate level. Since the late 1970s the literature has focused on versions...

This chapter is an exposition, rather than a survey, of the one-sector neoclassical growth model. It describes how the model is constructed as a simplified description of the real side of a growing capitalist economy that happens to be free of fluctuations in aggregate demand. Once that is done,...

This chapter gives an overview of the recent literature on indeterminacy and sunspots in macroeconomics. It discusses of some of the conceptual and the technical aspects of this literature, and provides a simple framework for illustrating the mechanisms of various dynamic equilibrium models that...

Recent literature in empirical finance is surveyed in its relation to underlying behavioral principles, principles which come primarily from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The behavioral principles discussed are: prospect theory, regret and cognitive dissonance, anchoring, mental...

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it reviews the model of search and matching equilibrium and derives the properties of employment and unemployment equilibrium. Second, it applies the model to the study of employment fluctuations and to the explanation of differences in unemployment...

This chapter surveys the recent literature on the theory of macroeconomic policy. We study the effect of various incentive constraints on the policy making process, such as lack of credibility, political opportunism, political ideology, and divided government. The survey is organized in three...

This chapter reviews the literature that tries to explain the disparity and variation of GDP per worker and GDP per capita across countries and across time. There are many potential explanations for the different patterns of development across countries, including differences in luck, raw...

High and persistent inflation has been one of the distinguishing macroeconomic characteristics of many developing countries since the end of World War II. Countries afflicted by chronic inflation, however, have not taken their fate lightly and have engaged in repeated stabilization attempts....

We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle.We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...