This year, the NBER Macroeconomics Annual celebrates its thirtieth volume. The first two papers examine China's macroeconomic development. "Trends and Cycles in China's Macroeconomy" by Chun Chang, Kaiji Chen, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha outlines the key characteristics of growth and business cycles in China. "Demystifying the Chinese Housing Boom" by Hanming Fang, Quanlin Gu, Wei Xiong, and Li-An Zhou constructs a new house price index, showing that Chinese house prices have grown by ten percent per year over the past decade. The third paper, "External and Public Debt Crises" by Cristina Arellano, Andrew Atkeson, and Mark Wright, asks why there appear to be large differences across countries and subnational jurisdictions in the effect of rising public debts on economic outcomes. The fourth, "Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration" by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr, explains how the network structure of the US economy propagates the effect of gross output productivity shocks across upstream and downstream sectors. The fifth and sixth papers investigate the usefulness of surveys of household's beliefs for understanding economic phenomena. "Expectations and Investment," by Nicola Gennaioli, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, demonstrates that a chief financial officer's expectations of a firm's future earnings growth is related to both the planned and actual future investment of that firm. "Declining Desire to Work and Downward Trends in Unemployment and Participation" by Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura shows that an increasing number of prime-age Americans who are not in the labor force report no desire to work and that this decline accelerated during the second half of the 1990s.

The thirty-first edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. The first two papers are rigorous and data-driven analyses of the European financial crisis. The third paper introduces a new set of facts about economic growth and financial ratios as well as a new macrofinancial database for the study of historical financial booms and busts. The fourth paper studies the historical effects of Federal Reserve efforts to provide guidance about the future path of the funds rate. The fifth paper explores the distinctions between models of price setting and associated nominal frictions using data on price setting behavior. The sixth paper considers the possibility that the economy displays nonlinear dynamics that lead to cycles rather than long-term convergence to a steady state. The volume also includes a short paper on the decline in the rate of global economic growth.

This volume contains six studies on current topics in macroeconomics. The first shows that while assuming rational expectations is unrealistic, a finite-horizon forward planning model can yield results similar to those of a rational expectations equilibrium. The second explores the aggregate risk of the U.S. financial sector, and in particular whether it is safer now than before the 2008 financial crisis. The third analyzes "factorless income," output that is not measured as capital or labor income. Next, a study argues that the financial crisis increased the perceived risk of a very bad economic and financial outcome, and explores the propagation of large, rare shocks. The next paper documents the substantial recent changes in the manufacturing sector and the decline in employment among prime-aged Americans since 2000. The last paper analyzes the dynamic macroeconomic effects of border adjustment taxes.

The thirty-first edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. The first two papers are rigorous and data-driven analyses of the European financial crisis. The third paper introduces a new set of facts about economic growth and financial ratios as well as a new macrofinancial database for the study of historical financial booms and busts. The fourth paper studies the historical effects of Federal Reserve efforts to provide guidance about the future path of the funds rate. The fifth paper explores the distinctions between models of price setting and associated nominal frictions using data on price setting behavior. The sixth paper considers the possibility that the economy displays nonlinear dynamics that lead to cycles rather than long-term convergence to a steady state. The volume also includes a short paper on the decline in the rate of global economic growth.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2021 presents research-central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. Robert Hall and Marianna Kudlyak examine unemployment dynamics during economic recoveries. They present new empirical findings and explore models in which the labor market gradually draws down the stock of unemployed workers in the aftermath of a downturn. Titan Alon, Sena Coskun, Matthias Doepke, David Koll, and Michèle Tertilt analyze the relative decline in employment of women during the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated global recession. They show that increased childcare needs, which fell more heavily on women, and differences in occupations both contributed. In the case of the US, however, each of these factors account for less than 20% of the gender gap in hours worked during the pandemic. Richard Rogerson and Johanna Wallenius study the employment rates of older workers in OECD countries over the last forty years. An expansion of institutions incentivizing retirement, concurrent with negative aggregate shocks between 1970 and 1995, led to falling employment rates. This trend started to reverse in the mid-1990s when many of these institutions, such as public pension programs, were cut back. Michael Barnett, William Brock, and Lars Peter Hansen explore the consequences of risk, ambiguity, and model misspecification in climate policy design. They consider carbon emissions pricing and the effects of different sources of uncertainty—such as future information about environmental damage, uncertainties in carbon and temperature dynamics and damage functions, and the role of future green technologies—on policy design. Michael Kremer, Jack Willis, and Yang You present new evidence suggesting a steady trend toward income convergence across countries since the late 1980s. They find convergence in various determinants of economic growth across countries and a flattening of the relationship between growth and these determinants. The paper challenges theories of growth arising after earlier rejections of the neoclassical growth model.

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2020 presents research by leading scholars on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. George-Marios Angeletos, Zhen Huo, and Karthik Sastry ask how to model expectations without rational expectations. They find that in response to business cycle shocks, expectations underreact initially but eventually overshoot, which in their view favors models with dispersed, noisy information and overextrapolation of expectations. Next, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Nicholas Trachter contrast the patterns of rising aggregate firm market concentration with falling market concentration over time at the local level. Some associate rising concentration with less competition and more market power, but because most product markets are local, studying changes in local competition, as opposed to trends in aggregate competition, provides important insights. Adam Guren, Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson develop a novel econometric procedure to recover structural parameters using cross-region variation, for example, to estimate direct effects of housing wealth changes on individual household consumption. To avoid confounding direct and indirect effects, the authors isolate the direct effect of house price changes on consumption by using other estimates of demand multipliers from the local government spending literature to deflate estimates of the total effect of local consumption on local house prices. Peter Klenow and Huiyu Li examine the sources of reduced productivity growth by quantifying the contribution of innovation to economic growth. They find that young firms generate roughly half the productivity growth, most of the changes in productivity during the mid-1990s are accounted for by older firms, and most growth results from quality improvements on incumbents’ own products. In the fifth chapter, Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song use detailed micro panel data from the Social Security Administration to assess the progress women have made into the top 1% and top 0.1% of the income distribution over time. Finally, Joachim Hubmer, Per Krusell, and Anthony Smith Jr. explore the reasons for growing wealth inequality across the developed world. They argue that the significant drop in tax progressivity starting in the late 1970s was the most important source of growing wealth inequality in the United States. The sharp observed increases in earnings inequality and the falling labor share cannot account for the bulk of the increase in wealth inequality.