Transition in Central Europe is four years old. State firms which dominated the economy are struggling with market forces. A new private sector quickly emerged and has taken hold. Unemployment, which did not exist, is high and still increasing. Will this process of transition accelerate, or slow...

Why movements in nominal money appear to have strong and lasting effects on real activity is one of the most difficult questions in macroeconomics. The paper surveys the state of knowledge on the issue. with a focus on recent developments. The paper starts by reviewing the evolution of thought...

Two key facts about European unemployment must be explained: the rise in unemployment since the 1960s, and the heterogeneity of individual country experiences. While adverse shocks can potentially explain much of the rise in unemployment, there is insufficient heterogeneity in these shocks to...

This paper attempts to give a structural interpretation to the distributed lag of sales on investment at the two-digit level in US manufacturing. It first presents a simple model which captures the various sources of lags and their respective implications. It then estimates the model, using both...

The answer to the question in the title is: A lot. In this essay, I argue that the history of macroeconomics during the 20th century can be divided in three epochs: Pre 1940. A period of exploration, where macroeconomics was not macroeconomics yet, but monetary theory on one side, business cycle...

European unemployment is widely regarded as a problem of excessive real wages. This view as it is usually expressed carries the disturbing implication that there is a sharp conflict between the interests of those currently employed and the unemployed because it suggests that increases in...

We interpret fluctuations in GNP and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances: disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not. We interpret the first as supply disturbances, the second as demand disturbances. We find that demand disturbances have a hump...

We construct a utility-based model of fluctuations, with nominal rigidities and unemployment, and draw its implications for the unemployment-inflation tradeoff and for the conduct of monetary policy.<br><br>We proceed in two steps. We first leave nominal rigidities aside. We show that, under a standard...

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

The standard model of optimal growth, interpreted as a model of a market economy with infinitely long-lived agents, does not allow separation of the savings decisions of agents from the investment decisions of firms. Investment is essentially passive: the "one good" assumption leads to a...