NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2012

The twenty-seventh edition of the "NBER Macroeconomics Annual" continues a tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical contributions that shed light on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics, pushing the frontiers of macroeconomic research on topics related to both the business cycle and economic growth and addressing important policy-relevant questions. This year's volume features two papers that illuminate two causes of the recent financial crisis: how firms accessed credit during the financial crisis and how and changing price and treatment of risk in mortgage lending was measured in the UK in the decades before the crisis. Other papers in this volume include a study of individual prices over time that draws out the implications of observed price adjustment for macroeconomic models of price stickiness, a focus on the implications of microeconomic estimates of labor supply for the determination of employment rates, a look at the empirical validity of the Keynesian view of reasons for employment declines during recessions, and an innovative paper that measures the efficacy of fiscal stimulus by looking at the economic impact of changes in federal highway spending across US states.