The goals of the annual NBER Macroeconomics Conference are to present, extend, and apply frontier work in macroeconomics and to stimulate work by macroeconomists in policy issues. Each paper in the Annual is followed by comments and discussion.

The 20th NBER Macroeconomics Annual, covering questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to current policy debates.

Papers by leading researchers consider such questions as the effect of government debt on interest rates; technology shocks, demand shocks, and output volatility; and procyclical macroeconomic policies in developing countries.

Current issues in macroeconomics.

Current issues in macroeconomics.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents pioneering work in macroeconomics by leading academic researchers to an audience of public policymakers and the academic community. Each commissioned paper is followed by comments and discussion. This year's edition provides a mix of cutting-edge research and policy analysis on such topics as productivity and information technology, the increase in wealth inequality, behavioral economics, and inflation.

The goals of the annual NBER Macroeconomics Conference are to present, extend, and apply frontier work in macroeconomics and to stimulate work by macroeconomists in policy issues. Each paper in the Annual is followed by comments and discussion. The goals of the annual NBER Macroeconomics Conference are to present, extend, and apply frontier work in macroeconomics and to stimulate work by macroeconomists in policy issues. Each paper in the Annual is followed by comments and discussion.

Provides evidence of a problem with the influential testing and assessment of Solow¿s (1956) growth model proposed by Mankiw et al. (1992) and a series of papers evaluating the latter. First, the assumption of a common rate of technical progress maintained by Mankiw et al. (1992) is relaxed. Solow¿s model is extended to include the different levels and rates of technical progress of each country. This increases the explanatory power of the cross-country variation in income/capital of the OECD countries to over 80%. The estimates of the parameters are statistically significant and take the expected values and signs. Second, the estimates merely reflect a statistical artifact. This has serious implications for the possibility of actually testing Solow¿s growth model. Illus.