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, nominal rigidity, also known as price-stickiness or wage-stickiness, is a situation in which a nominal price is resistant to change. Complete nominal rigidity occurs when a price is fixed in nominal terms for a relevant period of time. For example, the price of a particular good might be fixed at $10 per unit for a year. Partial nominal rigidity occurs when a price may vary in nominal terms, but not as much as it would if perfectly flexible. For example, in a regulated market there might be limits to how much a price can change in a given year.
Fernando Enrique Alvarez is an Argentine macroeconomist. He is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. in Economics at Universidad Nacional de La Plata in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2008. He was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Constantine Christos "Costas" Azariadis is a macroeconomist born in Athens, Greece. He has worked on numerous topics, such as labor markets, business cycles, and economic growth and development. Azariadis originated and developed implicit contract theory.
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.
Charles Irving Plosser is a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia who served from August 1, 2006, to March 1, 2015. An academic macroeconomist, he is well known for his work on real business cycles, a term which he and John B. Long, Jr. coined. Specifically, he wrote along with Charles R. Nelson in 1982 an influential work entitled "Trends and Random Walks in Macroeconomic Time Series" in which they dealt with the hypothesis of permanent shocks affecting the aggregate product (GDP).
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.
Microfoundations are an effort to understand macroeconomic phenomena in terms of economic agents' behaviors and their interactions. Research in microfoundations explores the link between macroeconomic and microeconomic principles in order to explore the aggregate relationships in macroeconomic models.
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.
Jordi Galí is a Spanish macroeconomist who is regarded as one of the main figures in New Keynesian macroeconomics today. He is currently the director of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. After obtaining his doctorate from MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Olivier Blanchard, he held faculty positions at Columbia University and New York University before moving to Barcelona.
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.
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.
In economics, King–Plosser–Rebelo preferences are a particular functional form of utility that is used in many macroeconomic models and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Having originally been proposed in an article that appeared in the Journal of Monetary Economics in 1988, the corresponding technical appendix detailing their derivation has only been published in 2002.
Martin Stewart Eichenbaum is the Charles Moskos professor of economics at Northwestern University, and the co-director of the Center for International Economics and Development. His research focuses on macroeconomics, international economics, and monetary theory and policy.
Sérgio T. Rebelo is a Portuguese economist who is the current MUFG Bank Distinguished Professor of International Finance at the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois, United States. He is also a co-director of the Center for International Macroeconomics at Northwestern University.
Marianne Baxter is a professor of economics at Boston University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago and a bachelor from the University of Rochester. She is a research associate at the NBER. She is the 412th most cited economist in the world according to IDEAS.
