This book sets forth both a theory and a comparative empirical analysis of stagflation, that peculiar combination of high unemployment, slow growth, and spurts of high inflation bedeviling the advanced industrial nations during the past fifteen years.

The authors first construct a small macroeconomic model that takes full account of aggregate demand and supply forces in the determination of output, employment, and the price level, in both a single-economy and a multi-economy setting. They then apply the model to provide an understanding of comparative performance of industrial countries in the areas of unemployment, inflation, productivity, and investment growth. They argue convincingly that the decay of the major economies during this period resulted from the supply shocks of the 1970s, such as the two major OPEC oil-price increases, and from the consequent policy-induced decrease in demand in response to inflationary pressures. Their analysis differs markedly from similar studies in that it takes specific account of institutional differences in the labor markets of the various economies. This helps to explain in particular the divergent adjustment profiles of the United States and Europe.

Michael Bruno and Jeffrey D. Sachs make several key recommendations for the mix of demand management and incomes policies necessary to combat stagflation in individual countries as well as for the coordination of macroeconomic policies among the major industrial nations.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental/energy economics and policy. Robert Stavins evaluates carbon taxes versus a cap-and-trade mechanism for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, arguing that specific design features of either instrument can be more consequential than the choice of instrument itself. Lucas Davis and James Sallee show that the exemption of electric vehicles from the gasoline tax is likely to be efficient as long as gasoline prices remain below social marginal costs, even though it results in lower tax revenue. Caroline Flammer analyzes the rapidly growing market for green bonds and highlights the importance of third-party certification to  the financial and environmental performance of publically traded companies. Antonio Bento, Mark Jacobsen, Christopher Knittel, and Arthur van Benthem develop a general framework for evaluating the costs and benefits of fuel economy standards and use it to account for the differences between several recent studies of changes in these standards.  Nicholas Muller estimates a measure of output in the U.S. economy over the last 60 years that accounts for air pollution damages, and shows  that pollution effects are sizable, affect growth rates, and have diminished appreciably over time. Finally, Marc Hafstead and Roberton Williams illustrate methods of accounting for  employment effects  when evaluating the costs and benefits of environmental regulations.   

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and related policy issues. Robert Pindyck provides a systematic overview of what is known, and remains unknown, about climate change, along with the implications of uncertainty for climate policy. Shaikh Eskander, Sam Fankhauser, and Joana Setzer offer insights from a comprehensive data set on climate change legislation and litigation across all countries of the world over the past thirty years. Adele Morris, Noah Kaufman, and Siddhi Doshi shine a light on how expected trends in the coal industry will create significant challenges for the local public finance of coal-reliant communities. Joseph Aldy and his collaborators analyze the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analyses of federal clean air regulations. Tatyana Deryugina and her co-authors report on the geographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. Finally, Oliver Browne, Ludovica Gazze, and Michael Greenstone use detailed data on residential water consumption to evaluate the relative impacts of conservation policies based on prices, restrictions, and public persuasion.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy in the United States. Rebecca Davis, J. Scott Holladay, and Charles Sims analyze recent trends in and forecasts of coal-fired power plant retirements with and without new climate policy. Severin Borenstein and James Bushnell examine the efficiency of pricing for electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. James Archsmith, Erich Muehlegger, and David Rapson provide a prospective analysis of future pathways for electric vehicle adoption. Kenneth Gillingham considers the consequences of such pathways for the design of fuel vehicle economy standards. Frank Wolak investigates the long-term resource adequacy in wholesale electricity markets with significant intermittent renewables. Finally, Barbara Annicchiarico, Stefano Carattini, Carolyn Fischer, and Garth Heutel review the state of research on the interactions between business cycles and environmental policy.

Macroeconomics tries to describe and explain the economywide movement of prices, output, and unemployment. The field has been sharply divided among various schools, including Keynesian, monetarist, new classical, and others. It has also been split between theorists and empiricists. Ray Fair is a resolute empiricist, developing and refining methods for testing theories and models. The field cannot advance without the discipline of testing how well the models approximate the data. Using a multicountry econometric model, he examines several important questions, including what causes inflation, how monetary authorities behave and what are their stabilization limits, how large is the wealth effect on aggregate consumption, whether European monetary policy has been too restrictive, and how large are the stabilization costs to Europe of adopting the euro. He finds, among other things, little evidence for the rational expectations hypothesis and for the so-called non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) hypothesis. He also shows that the U.S. economy in the last half of the 1990s was not a "new age" economy.

This book is a companion volume to Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory by Thomas J. Sargent. It provides scrimmages in dynamic macroeconomic theory--precisely the kind of drills that people will need in order to learn the techniques of dynamic programming and its applications to economics. By doing these exercises, the reader can acquire the ability to put the theory to work in a variety of new situations, build technical skill, gain experience in fruitful ways of setting up problems, and learn to distinguish cases in which problems are well posed from cases in which they are not.The basic framework provided by variants of a dynamic general equilibrium model is used to analyze problems in macroeconomics and monetary economics. An equilibrium model provides a mapping from parameters of preferences, technologies, endowments, and "rules of the game" to a probability model for time series. The rigor of the logical connections between theory and observations that the mapping provides is an attractive feature of dynamic equilibrium, or "rational expectations," models. This book gives repeated and varied practice in constructing and interpreting this mapping.