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.
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.
In economics, the fiscal multiplier is the ratio of change in national income arising from a change in government spending. More generally, the exogenous spending multiplier is the ratio of change in national income arising from any autonomous change in spending. When this multiplier exceeds one, the enhanced effect on national income may be called the multiplier effect. The mechanism that can give rise to a multiplier effect is that an initial incremental amount of spending can lead to increased income and hence increased consumption spending, increasing income further and hence further increasing consumption, etc., resulting in an overall increase in national income greater than the initial incremental amount of spending. In other words, an initial change in aggregate demand may cause a change in aggregate output that is a multiple of the initial change.
Zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) is a macroeconomic concept describing conditions with a very low nominal interest rate, such as those in contemporary Japan and in the United States from December 2008 through December 2015 and again from March 2020 until March 2022 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. ZIRP is considered to be an unconventional monetary policy instrument and can be associated with slow economic growth, deflation and deleverage.
Ricardo A. M. R. Reis is a Portuguese economist and the A. W. Phillips professor of economics at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on macroeconomics, including both monetary and fiscal policy, inflation and business cycles, and for these he won the 2021 Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation medal awarded every two years by the European Economic Association for best economist under the age of 45. He writes a weekly op-ed for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.
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.
Olivier Jean Blanchard is a French economist and professor who currently serves as the Robert M. Solow Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from September 1, 2008, to September 8, 2015. Blanchard was appointed to the position under the tenure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn; he was succeeded by Maurice Obstfeld. According to IDEAS/RePEc, he is one of the most cited economists in the world.
Mainstream economics is the body of knowledge, theories, and models of economics, as taught by universities worldwide, that are generally accepted by economists as a basis for discussion. Also known as orthodox economics, it can be contrasted to heterodox economics, which encompasses various schools or approaches that are only accepted by a minority of economists.
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling is a macroeconomic method which is often employed by monetary and fiscal authorities for policy analysis, explaining historical time-series data, as well as future forecasting purposes. DSGE econometric modelling applies general equilibrium theory and microeconomic principles in a tractable manner to postulate economic phenomena, such as economic growth and business cycles, as well as policy effects and market shocks.
Michael Dean Woodford is an American macroeconomist and monetary theorist who currently teaches at Columbia University.
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.
David Hibbard Romer is an American economist, the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a standard textbook in graduate macroeconomics as well as many influential economic papers, particularly in the area of New Keynesian economics. He is also the husband and close collaborator of Council of Economic Advisers former Chairwoman Christina Romer.
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.
The new neoclassical synthesis (NNS), which is now generally referred to as New Keynesian economics, and occasionally as the New Consensus, is the fusion of the major, modern macroeconomic schools of thought – new classical macroeconomics/real business cycle theory and early New Keynesian economics – into a consensus view on the best way to explain short-run fluctuations in the economy. This new synthesis is analogous to the neoclassical synthesis that combined neoclassical economics with Keynesian macroeconomics. The new synthesis provides the theoretical foundation for much of contemporary mainstream macroeconomics. It is an important part of the theoretical foundation for the work done by the Federal Reserve and many other central banks.
Monika Piazzesi received her PhD in economics at Stanford University. She was a recipient of the Deutsche Studienstiftung ERP (1997-2000). She has been the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics at Stanford University since 2010. She is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In 2005, when she was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Business School, she received the Germán Bernácer Prize. She subsequently won the Elaine Bennett Research Prize. Her research focuses on asset pricing and time series econometrics, especially related to bond markets and the term structure of interest rates. She has published papers related to housing issues, asset prices and quantities, bond markets, interest rate and GDP. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Giancarlo Corsetti, is an Italian macroeconomist and Professor of Macroeconomics at the European University Institute in Florence. He is best known in academia for his work on open economy macroeconomics and international economics. In March 2017, the IDEAS/RePEc overall ranking put him as the most influential economist at Cambridge University where he was teaching at the time.
Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé is a German economist who has been a professor of economics at Columbia University since 2008. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, fiscal policy, and monetary policy in open and closed economies. In 2004, she was awarded the Bernácer Prize, for her research on monetary stabilization policies.
Jón Steinsson is Chancellor's Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley, a research associate and co-director of the Monetary Economics program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and associate editor of both American Economic Review: Insights, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard and his AB from Princeton.
Greg Kaplan is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His research encompasses macroeconomics, labor economics and applied microeconomics, with a focus on distributional issues.
Matthias Doepke is a German economist, currently Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Gerald F. and Marjorie G. Fitzgerald Professor of Economic History at Northwestern University. His research focuses on economic growth, development, political economy and monetary economics.
