This is the first issue of a new Annual from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Annual is designed to stimulate research on problems in applied economics, to bring frontier theoretical developments to a wider audience, and to accelerate the interaction between analytical and empirical research in macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is becoming increasingly sophisticated and, at the same time, increasingly remote from current issues. As the profession loses touch with these issues, however, both it and economic policy suffer. Macroeconomics divorced from policy lacks vitality, and policy loses from the lack of serious, objective analysis.
Contents
Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem, Olivier Blanchard (MIT) and Lawrence Summers (Harvard); comments by John Kennan and Robert Hall • Efficiericy Wage Theories: A Partial Evaluation, Lawrence Katz (Berkeley); comments by Lawrence Weiss and Joseph Altonji • The Budget Deficit and the Dollar, Martin Feldstein (Harvard); comments by Alan Stockman and Rudiger Dombusch • Why is Japan's Saving Rate So Apparently High? Fumio Hayashi (Osaka); comments by Albert Ando and Paul Roemer • Do Equilibrium Real Business Cycle Theories Explain Post-War U.S. Business Cycles? Martin Eichenbaum and Kenneth Singleton (Carnegie-Mellon); comments by Robert Barro and N. Gregory Mankiw • Macroeconomic implication of Profit-Sharing, Martin Weitzman (MIT); comments by Alan Blinder and Russell Cooper