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The manuscripts below have been recommended for publication by the NBER.
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Below are summaries and links to the chapters.
Helena Fitz-Patrick
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Wealth, Financial Intermediation, and the Real Economy (Studies in
Income and Wealth)
Charles Hulten and Marshall Reinsdorf, editors
http://www.nber.org/books/hult10-1
The financial crisis and the housing price bubble that preceded it
reminded us of the importance of financial markets for economic growth
and stability and exposed the need for better measurement of financial
activity and its linkages to the real economy. The main theme of the
conference is how economic measurement should advance in light of
lessons learned in the financial crisis. One set of papers investigates
how gaps in the data, or in our understanding of the data, contributed
to our failure to spot emerging risks to financial stability before and
during the crisis. These papers also discuss strategies for filling
these gaps and for coping with the inherent dynamism of the financial
marketplace, which can cause measures that once worked well to become
misleading. A second set of papers examines recent advances in measuring
financial activity in the areas of defined benefit pension plans and
cross-border investment income. These advances change the picture of
saving by sectors, particularly households and state and local
governments, and help to clear up some much-discussed anomalies in net
investment income receipts of the United States. A third set of papers
uses micro data to investigate the effects of the crisis on households
and non-financial businesses. They find that a third of households
suffered financial distress during the crisis, with all age, education
and income groups suffering some type of setback. Nevertheless, at the
level of individual households, experiences varied greatly, with a
sizeable minority experiencing gains in wealth. The high variance of
outcomes may have affected aggregate spending because households
reported that would respond more strongly to losses in the value of
their assets than to gains. The papers also find that the increase in
personal saving recorded in the national accounts can be traced to
changes in households borrowing, not to stepped-up contributions to
savings and retirement accounts. Finally, the paper on non-financial
businesses finds that in the subprime mortgage crisis these businesses
were strongly affected by a loss of access to external sources of
funding for their liquidity and investment needs. The empirical results
in this paper suggest that policies aimed at improving businesses
access to credit would be more effective in ending the recession than
policies aimed at stimulating demand.
How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education
Jeffrey Brown and Caroline Hoxby, editors
http://www.nber.org/books/brow12-2
This book analyzes how universities manage their endowments and how they
responded to the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession. The
authors were selected deliberately to include experts on finance
(especially those who had experience with endowments) and experts on the
economics of higher education. From the outset, the book was intended to
foster a conversation with university leaders, and the chapters
benefited greatly from the meaningful discussions with them that
occurred at the associated conference. Key questions included (i)
whether universities methods of endowment management were optimal,
rational, and/or likely to create budget crises during financial market
downturns; (ii) whether donors, state governments, or the federal
government exacerbate or ameliorate the effect of business cycles on
universities; (iii) whether universities respond to reduced income by
cutting costs (for instance, by reducing their number of faculty) or by
raising tuition. Like a few previous NBER volumesbut unlike the vast
majority of other work by economiststhe studies analyze the economics
of higher education from the institutions point of view, taking them
seriously as organizations with incentives and constraints of their own.
NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2013
Jonathan Parker and Michael Woodford, editors
http://www.nber.org/books/park13-1
The twenty-eighth edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues
with its tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical research on
central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. As in previous years,
this volume not only addresses recent developments in macroeconomics,
but also takes up important policy-relevant questions and opens new
debates that will continue for years to come. Accompanying each paper
are two excellent discussions of the paper, each written by a leading
scholar in the area.
The papers in this volume tackle: fiscal and monetary policyhow it is
that interest rates and inflation can remain low despite fiscal policy
behavior that appears inconsistent with a monetary policy regime focused
only on inflation and output and not on fiscal balances as recently
observed in the U.S.; money and inflationboth the long run inflation
rate and the coexistence of money with pledgeable and so money-like
assets and why inflation does not increase in response to business-cycle
fluctuations in productivity; the labor marketthe implications of
reference-dependent preferences and moral hazard in employment
fluctuations; and finally, the stock market and how it relates to the
real economy.
Received on Fri Oct 11 2013 - 14:50:46 EDT
