The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) is a journal of macroeconomics published twice a year by the Brookings Institution Press.[1] Each issue of the journal comprises the proceedings of a conference held biannually by the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. The conference and journal both "emphasize innovative analysis that has an empirical orientation, take real-world institutions seriously, and is relevant to economic policy."[2]
The journal is written in a clear and accessible manner in order to maximize understanding of economics and policymaking, and covers a variety of macroeconomic topics from housing, business investments, and fiscal and monetary policy, to international capital flows, environmental issues, and more.[3]The journal briefly released an annual issue dedicated to microeconomic issues, but this was dropped as the focus cemented around macroeconomic policy.
BPEA has been ranked as a leading journal in the field since its initial publication in 1970[4]. Economist and former editor Justin Wolfers has said that the journal is "the most public policy-focused of all serious economics journal, or, among all public policy journals, it's the most serious economic analysis."[5] Each issue typically publishes six full-length papers, along with comments by two peer reviewers per paper, and a summary of the general discussion from the conference. The journal is released in hard copy format following the conference, and all past editions are available freely online from the Institution's website.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke contributed a paper to the Fall 2018 journal to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the financial crisis and the onset of the Great Recession. According to the Wall Street Journal, Bernanke pointed out that "when investors fled from short-term financing markets in 2008, the panic engulfing Wall Street spread to the rest of the economy…"[6]The Wall Street Journal further cited Bernanke's BPEA contribution by noting that "Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a new paper that the credit-market panic that culminated 10 years ago when Lehman Brothers failed better explains the severity of the 2007-09 recession than the housing bust does."[7]Bernanke also discussed in his paper the decision not to rescue Lehman Brothers, and reflected on the ramifications of that choice.[8]
Additionally, the journal also considers the social ramifications of economic policy. For example, the Spring 2019 paper "Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century" by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton looked deeply "at a divided America – and its crisis of suicide, overdoses, and drug- and alcohol-fueled diseases."[9]That paper was also cited in the Washington Post for its notable findings, such as, "[s]ickness and early death in the white working class could be rooted in poor job prospects for less-educated young people as they first enter the labor market, a situation that compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity and other pathologies…".[10]
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
In economics, stagflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high or increasing, the economic growth rate slows, and unemployment remains steadily high. Stagflation, once thought impossible, poses a dilemma for economic policy, as measures to reduce inflation may exacerbate unemployment.
In economics, inflation is a general increase in the prices of goods and services in an economy. This is usually measured using the consumer price index (CPI). When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation corresponds to a reduction in the purchasing power of money. The opposite of CPI inflation is deflation, a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index. As prices faced by households do not all increase at the same rate, the consumer price index (CPI) is often used for this purpose.
In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0%. Inflation reduces the value of currency over time, but deflation increases it. This allows more goods and services to be bought than before with the same amount of currency. Deflation is distinct from disinflation, a slowdown in the inflation rate; i.e., when inflation declines to a lower rate but is still positive.
New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
The Phillips curve is an economic model, named after Bill Phillips, that correlates reduced unemployment with increasing wages in an economy. While Phillips did not directly link employment and inflation, this was a trivial deduction from his statistical findings. Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow made the connection explicit and subsequently Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps put the theoretical structure in place.
The causes of the Great Depression in the early 20th century in the United States have been extensively discussed by economists and remain a matter of active debate. They are part of the larger debate about economic crises and recessions. The specific economic events that took place during the Great Depression are well established.
John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Edmund Strother Phelps is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
George Selgin is an American economist. He is Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is editor-in-chief of the center's blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Selgin formerly taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University.
The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis, or just neo-Keynesianism was a neoclassical economics academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). It was formulated most notably by John Hicks (1937), Franco Modigliani (1944), and Paul Samuelson (1948), who dominated economics in the post-war period and formed the mainstream of macroeconomic thought in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations.
The Great Moderation is a period in the United States of America starting from the mid-1980s until at least 2007 characterized by the reduction in the volatility of business cycle fluctuations in developed nations compared with the decades before. It is believed to be caused by institutional and structural changes, particularly in central bank policies, in the second half of the twentieth century.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to economics:
Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is a theoretical level of unemployment below which inflation would be expected to rise. It was first introduced as NIRU by Franco Modigliani and Lucas Papademos in 1975, as an improvement over the "natural rate of unemployment" concept, which was proposed earlier by Milton Friedman.
George L. Perry is an American economist, currently a Senior Fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. In 1970, he and Arthur Okun founded the Brookings Panel and its journal, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA). They conceived the Panel as a way to apply rigorous economic research to current economic puzzles, problems and policy issues. After Okun's death in 1980, William Brainard replaced him and Brainard and Perry ran the Panel and edited BPEA until 2007.
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
Real business-cycle theory is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real shocks. Unlike other leading theories of the business cycle, RBC theory sees business cycle fluctuations as the efficient response to exogenous changes in the real economic environment. That is, the level of national output necessarily maximizes expected utility, and governments should therefore concentrate on long-run structural policy changes and not intervene through discretionary fiscal or monetary policy designed to actively smooth out economic short-term fluctuations.
Stephanie Aaronson is an American economist. She received her PhD in economics from Columbia University. Aaronson served as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution until December 2022, where she held the position of vice president and director of economic studies. She specializes in labor economics and her current research focuses on labor force participation in the United States. Her work has been published in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review. Her research has also been featured in prominent news publications, including The New York Times and The Economist.
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