American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Noah Williams

Williams asks whether the recurrent boom-bust dynamics of Minsky's financial instability hypothesis — "periods of stability lead to periods of instability" — can arise endogenously from a tractable …

Lukasz Rachel

This paper builds a tractable, fully analytical version of the workhorse macro-epidemiology ("econ-epi") model and uses it to characterize how susceptible individuals behave during a deadly epidemic, …

Ana Fostel · John Geanakoplos · Gregory Phelan

The paper asks why large gross financial flows exist between similarly rich countries (especially the U.S. and Europe), why financial integration raises rather than lowers asset price volatility, and …

Mitali Das · Gita Gopinath · Helene Hall · Taehoon Kim · Jeremy C. Stein

This paper investigates why non-U.S. central banks accumulate large holdings of dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves, focusing on a previously under-emphasized motive: the currency mismatch of …

Katharina Bergant · Prachi Mishra · Raghuram Rajan · Freddy Pinzon-Puerto

This paper examines how unexpected changes in U.S. monetary policy transmit to cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activity globally, covering both the volume of deals and their quality as …

Taeyoung Doh · Dongho Song · Shu-Kuei Yang

This paper proposes a text-based measure of monetary policy stance by modelling FOMC post-meeting statements as convex combinations of the staff-drafted dovish ("alternative A") and hawkish …

Julien Acalin · Laurence Ball

The fall in the US federal debt-held-by-the-public/GDP ratio from a postwar peak of 106% in fiscal year 1946 to a trough of 23% in 1974 is widely cited (Elmendorf-Mankiw, Krugman) as evidence that an …

Stephen Ayerst · Loren Brandt · Diego Restuccia

This paper asks how institutional distortions to factor markets affect not only the static allocation of inputs across farms but also the dynamic choices — crop selection and productivity-enhancing …

Alvaro Garcia-Marin · Santiago Justel · Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

This paper provides a theory and evidence for why firms with higher markups extend more trade credit, focusing on a financing cost channel that is distinct from existing competition-based …

Eugene Tan

This paper investigates how the illiquidity of entrepreneurial capital shapes investment dynamics and wealth inequality. The central question is whether entrepreneurship drives wealth heterogeneity or …

Eric Jondeau · Gregory Levieuge · Jean-Guillaume Sahuc · Gauthier Vermandel

This paper asks whether public subsidies to green-technology producers, financed by a carbon tax, can materially reduce the macroeconomic cost of reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by 2060. The …

Ruixue Jia · Xiao Ma · Victoria Wenxin Xie

This paper studies how the expectation of rising flood risk — distinct from realized flood events — reshapes where firms locate, where workers live and how much they work, and what this implies for …

Alessandro Ferrari · Francisco Queirós

Ferrari and Queirós ask why US recoveries have become progressively slower and argue that rising firm heterogeneity and market power — well-documented long-run trends — can substantially increase the …

Hiroshi Inokuma · Juan M. Sánchez

This paper asks how the well-documented slowdown in labor-force growth affects aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth, a question that prior work on business dynamism had left unanswered. …

Rodrigo Adão · Costas Arkolakis · Federico Esposito

How do international trade shocks propagate through spatially connected regional labor markets, and how large are the general equilibrium effects that standard shift-share specifications miss? Adão, …

Nick Pretnar · Maria Feldman

The paper investigates why the U.S. health-services sector has simultaneously experienced a tripling of relative prices since 1948 and a rise in the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) share from …

Flavien Moreau · Ludovic Panon

Moreau and Panon ask how much cartels cost the aggregate economy — in terms of both total factor productivity and welfare — and find the losses are considerably larger than the received wisdom from …

S. Borağan Aruoba · Thomas Drechsel

To study how monetary policy affects the economy, macroeconomists must isolate "shocks" — changes in interest rates that are not systematic responses to economic conditions. The paper proposes a new …

William A. Branch

Branch (2022) asks whether subjective consumer inflation expectations causally raise the inflation rate — a question whose empirical answer has been elusive despite its central role in New Keynesian …

Holger Breinlich · Elsa Leromain · Dennis Novy · Thomas Sampson

Research question and motivation. How does import liberalization affect a country's export performance and welfare?

Maria-Jose Carreras-Valle

This paper documents and explains a previously unreported reversal in U.S. manufacturing inventory trends: after a 25-year secular decline, inventories-to-sales ratios have been rising steadily since …

Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Ari Kutai · Rafi Melnick

Research question and motivation. How do firms form and update inflation expectations during a monetary-policy regime change and a transition from high/volatile inflation to a low, stable, …

Carlo Altavilla · Giacomo Carboni · Michele Lenza · Harald Uhlig

This paper asks whether uncertainty in the interbank market — distinct from general macroeconomic uncertainty — raises the cost of bank credit to firms, and whether bank-specific characteristics …

Isabel Cairó · Avi Lipton

This paper addresses two connected questions: why do Black workers face persistently higher and more volatile unemployment than white workers, and can the Federal Reserve's August 2020 shift from a …

Benjamin Bridgman · Berthold Herrendorf

The paper asks why the U.S. labor share has declined over the postwar period, and whether rising markups or capital deepening (automation, falling capital prices) is the primary driver. The authors …

Andrea Ferrero · Maurizio Michael Habib · Livio Stracca · Fabrizio Venditti

This paper investigates how institutional quality shapes (i) the domestic financial and macroeconomic impact of Global Financial Cycle (GFC) shocks on emerging market economies (EMEs) and (ii) the …

Sebastian Ellingsen

This paper asks whether the location of economic activity adapts to changes in the location of trading opportunities, or whether historical patterns of trade permanently fix where cities emerge and …

Jianjun Miao · Zhouxiang Shen · Dongling Su

This paper asks how bank holdings of long-term government securities interact with interest-rate-driven monetary tightening to amplify macroeconomic downturns and generate banking crises. The …

Junichi Fujimoto · David Lagakos · Mitchell VanVuren

This paper asks whether publicly funded ("free") secondary schooling in developing countries raises GDP per capita. The question is policy-relevant because many low-income countries — including Ghana, …

Tuo Chen · Chang-Tai Hsieh · Zheng (Michael) Song

Chen, Hsieh, and Song study the use of unofficial non-tariff barriers (NTBs) by China during the U.S.-China trade war of 2018–2019 and in the first year of the Phase 1 purchase agreement (2020). The …

Luca Gagliardone · Mark Gertler

Gagliardone and Gertler ask why the US inflation surge that began in mid-2021 was both sudden and persistent, and whether a simple structural model can account for it without targeting inflation in …

Minsu Chang · Frank Schorfheide

This paper asks how conventional and informational monetary policy shocks affect the cross-sectional distributions of labor earnings, consumption, and financial income in the United States. The …

Damien Capelle · Yang Liu

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of a tax on inflation policy (TIP)—a fiscal instrument that would require firms to pay a tax proportional to the increase in their prices—as a complement to …

Mohamad Adhami · Mark Bils · Charles I. Jones · Peter J. Klenow

The paper asks how much economic progress looks different when one applies a total utilitarian welfare criterion — counting every person's flow utility — rather than the standard per-capita …

Matthew Klepacz

This paper asks whether increases in aggregate volatility reduce the effectiveness of monetary policy by making aggregate prices more flexible. The motivation is concrete: policymakers worry that …

Andrés Fernández · Daniel Guzman · Ruy Lama · Carlos Végh

Developing and emerging economies exhibit procyclical fiscal policy on both the spending and taxation sides: government expenditures expand in booms and contract in recessions, and tax rates fall in …

Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Debora Revoltella · Jan Svejnar · Christoph T. Weiss

This paper investigates why firms in the European Union exhibit wide dispersion in marginal revenue products (MRP) of capital and labor — a direct indicator of resource misallocation — and asks how …

Martin Shu

This paper asks whether worker self-selection, rather than slow technological progress, can explain the low measured labor productivity growth in the U.S. service sector — a phenomenon known as …

Sjak Smulders · Sophie Zhou

This paper by Smulders and Zhou challenges the standard lock-in narrative for the slow green transition. The conventional explanation — path dependency in directed technical change (DTC) — is hard to …

Loren Brandt · Ruochen Dai · Gueorgui Kambourov · Kjetil Storesletten · Xiaobo Zhang

This paper studies entrepreneurship and new firm creation in China through the lens of serial entrepreneurs (SEs) — individuals who establish more than one firm — contrasting them with non-serial …

Sakai Ando · Tamon Asonuma · Prachi Mishra · Alexandre Sollaci

Sovereign debt restructuring is a central tool for countries in debt distress, yet surprisingly little evidence exists on whether it actually reduces the debt-to-GDP ratio — the metric used in …

Esther Ann Bøler · Andreas Moxnes · Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

Firms that invest heavily in intangible assets — patents, R&D, software — face a structural financing disadvantage: intangibles offer limited collateral value to banks, so intangible-intensive firms …

Hans A. Holter · Serhiy Stepanchuk · Yicheng Wang

This paper investigates how the level and progressivity of personal income taxes shape entrepreneurial activity in the United States, contributing empirical evidence, theoretical intuition, and a …

Russell Cooper · Ozgen Ozturk

This paper investigates what drives the countercyclical dispersion of TFPR — total factor productivity measured in revenue terms — a pattern that is well documented empirically but poorly understood …

Rosemary Kaiser

Many countries, primarily in Europe, apply dismissal protections to permanent employment contracts but not to temporary ones, creating a two-tiered labor market in which younger and less educated …

Jean-Félix Brouillette

Women accounted for only 3% of U.S. inventors in 1976 and still just 14% in 2023, a pace of convergence far slower than in law (3% to 49%) or medicine (6% to 46%) over the same period. Under the …

Eunkyung Lee

Research question and motivation. This paper asks how monetary policy transmits to corporate investment through bank credit, and specifically whether the relevant credit margin is the origination of …

Titan Alon · Damien Capelle · Kazushige Matsuda

This paper proposes that university R&D is determined endogenously by competition for tuition and talented students in the market for higher education, and asks why universities fund research …

Michael W. L. Elsby · Axel Gottfries · Pawel Krolikowski · Gary Solon

This paper develops a tractable theoretical model of wage dynamics in long-term employment relationships, situated between two polar extremes in the existing literature: continual Nash renegotiation …

Maria Alsina-Pujols

This paper asks how the threat of forced climate migration — international displacement driven by climate-induced natural disasters — should alter optimal carbon taxation. The motivation is twofold.

Drago Bergholt · Fabio Canova · Francesco Furlanetto · Nicolò Maffei-Faccioli · Pål Ulvedal

The paper addresses what drove the post-COVID inflation surge in the United States and internationally. Before answering the substantive question, the authors identify and diagnose a methodological …

Olivier Coibion

This 2012 American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics paper by Olivier Coibion asks why standard recursive VARs and the Romer-Romer (2004) narrative approach produce such different estimates of the real …

Marek Jarociński · Peter Karadi

This 2020 American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics paper by Marek Jarociński and Peter Karadi argues that conventional high-frequency-identified monetary policy surprises conflate two economically …

Olivier Blanchard · Jordi Galí

A New Keynesian model is extended with hiring costs that rise in labour market tightness and with real wage rigidity, so that unemployment exists and moves. Under the paper's utility specification the …

Mark Gertler · Peter Karadi

This 2015 American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics paper by Mark Gertler and Peter Karadi uses a "proxy SVAR" — a structural VAR identified with external instruments rather than timing restrictions — …

V. V. Chari · Patrick J. Kehoe · Ellen R. McGrattan

This 2009 American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics paper by V. V.

Michael Woodford

This paper works through a series of simple, analytically solvable New Keynesian models to show that the size of the government-spending multiplier depends almost entirely on the monetary policy …

Juan J Cruces · Christoph Trebesch

The first present-value estimates of creditor losses for all 180 sovereign debt restructurings with foreign banks and bondholders between 1978 and 2010 -- average haircut 37%, with half the cases …

Ralph Luetticke

In a two-asset HANK model where households hold liquid bonds and illiquid capital, monetary policy transmits mainly through investment rather than consumption, but a tightening redistributes income …

Olivier Coibion · Yuriy Gorodnichenko

This 2012 American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics paper by Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko adjudicates between two observationally similar explanations for the federal funds rate target's …