Top economists consider how to conduct policy in a world where previous beliefs have been shattered by the recent financial and economic crises. Since 2008, economic policymakers and researchers have occupied a brave new economic world. Previous consensuses have been upended, former assumptions have been cast into doubt, and new approaches have yet to stand the test of time. Policymakers have been forced to improvise and researchers to rethink basic theory. George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate and one of this volume's editors, compares the crisis to a cat stuck in a tree, afraid to move. In April 2013, the International Monetary Fund brought together leading economists and economic policymakers to discuss the slowly emerging contours of the macroeconomic future. This book offers their combined insights. The editors and contributors-who include the Nobel Laureate and bestselling author Joseph Stiglitz, Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen, and the former Governor of the Bank of Israel Stanley Fischer-consider the lessons learned from the crisis and its aftermath. They discuss, among other things, post-crisis questions about the traditional policy focus on inflation; macroprudential tools (which focus on the stability of the entire financial system rather than of individual firms) and their effectiveness; fiscal stimulus, public debt, and fiscal consolidation; and exchange rate arrangements.

These two volumes bring together a set of important essays that represent a "new Keynesian" perspective in economics today. This recent work shows how the Keynesian approach to economic fluctuations can be supported by rigorous microeconomic models of economic behavior. The essays are grouped in seven parts that cover costly price adjustment, staggering of wages and prices, imperfect competition, coordination failures, and the markets for labor, credit, and goods. An overall introduction, brief introductions to each of the parts, and a bibliography of additional papers in the field round out this valuable collection.Volume 1 focuses on how friction in price setting at the microeconomic level leads to nominal rigidity at the macroeconomic level, and on the macroeconomic consequences of imperfect competition, including aggregate demand externalities and multipliers. Volume 2 addresses recent research on non-Walrasian features of the labor, credit, and goods markets.N. Gregory Mankiw is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. David Romer is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.Contributors: George A Akerlof. Costas Azariadis. Laurence Ball. Ben S. Bernanke. Mark Bits. Olivier J. Blanchard. Alan S. Blinder. John Bryant. Andrew S. Caplin. Dennis W. Carlton. Stephen G. Cecchetti. Russell Cooper. Peter A. Diamond. Gary Fethke. Stanley Fischer. Robert E. Hall. Oliver Hart. Andrew John. Nobuhiro Kiyotaki. Alan B. Krueger. David M. Lilien. Ian M. McDonald. N. David Mankiw. Arthur M. Okun. Andres Policano. David Romer. Julio J. Rotemberg. Garth Saloner. Carl Shapiro. Andrei Shleifer. Robert M. Solow. Daniel F. Spulber. Joseph E. Stiglitz. Lawrence H. Summers. John Taylor. Andrew Weiss. Michael Woodford. Janet L. Yellen.

These two volumes bring together a set of important essays that represent a "new Keynesian" perspective in economics today. This recent work shows how the Keynesian approach to economic fluctuations can be supported by rigorous microeconomic models of economic behavior. The essays are grouped in seven parts that cover costly price adjustment, staggering of wages and prices, imperfect competition, coordination failures, and the markets for labor, credit, and goods. An overall introduction, brief introductions to each of the parts, and a bibliography of additional papers in the field round out this valuable collection.Volume 1 focuses on how friction in price setting at the microeconomic level leads to nominal rigidity at the macroeconomic level, and on the macroeconomic consequences of imperfect competition, including aggregate demand externalities and multipliers. Volume 2 addresses recent research on non-Walrasian features of the labor, credit, and goods markets.N. Gregory Mankiw is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. David Romer is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.Contributors: George A Akerlof. Costas Azariadis. Laurence Ball. Ben S. Bernanke. Mark Bits. Olivier J. Blanchard. Alan S. Blinder. John Bryant. Andrew S. Caplin. Dennis W. Carlton. Stephen G. Cecchetti. Russell Cooper. Peter A. Diamond. Gary Fethke. Stanley Fischer. Robert E. Hall. Oliver Hart. Andrew John. Nobuhiro Kiyotaki. Alan B. Krueger. David M. Lilien. Ian M. McDonald. N. David Mankiw. Arthur M. Okun. Andres Policano. David Romer. Julio J. Rotemberg. Garth Saloner. Carl Shapiro. Andrei Shleifer. Robert M. Solow. Daniel F. Spulber. Joseph E. Stiglitz. Lawrence H. Summers. John Taylor. Andrew Weiss. Michael Woodford. Janet L. Yellen.