This year the NBER Macroeconomics Annual celebrates its 30th volume. The first two papers examine China’s macroeconomic development. Trends and Cycles in China’s Macroeconomy” by Chun Chang,
Kaiji Chen, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha, outlines the key characteristics of growth and business cycles in China. The second, Demystifying the Chinese Housing Boom” by Hanming Fang,
Quanlin Gu, Wei Xiong, and Li-An Zhou constructs a new house price index, showing that Chinese house prices have grown by ten percent a year over the past decade. The third paper, External
and Public Debt Crises,” by Cristina Arellano, Andrew Atkeson, and Mark Wright, asks why there appear to be large differences across countries and sub-national jurisdictions in the effect of
rising public debts on economic outcomes. The fourth, Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration,” by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr, explains how the network
structure of the US economy propagates the effect of gross output productivity shocks across upstream and downstream sectors. The fifth and sixth papers investigate the usefulness of surveys
of household’s beliefs for understanding economic phenomena. Expectations and Investment,” by Nicola Gennaioli, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, demonstrates that a chief financial officer’s
expectations of a firm’s future earnings growth is related to both the planned and actual future investment of that firm. Declining Desire to Work and Downward Trends in Unemployment and
Participation,” by Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura, shows that an increasing number of prime-age Americans who are not in the labor force report no desire to work and that this decline
accelerated during the second half of the 1990s.
