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Provides a forum for leading economists to participate in important debates in macroeconomics and to report on major developments in macroeconomic analysis and policy.

This fortieth volume of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual includes four new papers on contemporary macroeconomic challenges and methodologies. Christopher Clayton, Matteo Maggiori, and Jesse Schreger examine how hegemonic powers use economic policies as tools of influence on target countries and show how the effectiveness of these policies depends on the target’s available alternatives and whether it can take advantage of those alternatives. José Luis Montiel Olea, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, Eric Qian, and Christian Wolf provide essential guidance for practitioners choosing between vector autoregressions and local projections for estimating impulse response functions. Kristin Forbes, Jongrim Ha, and M. Ayhan Kose analyze inflation-output tradeoffs across rate cycles from the 1970s to the post-pandemic period using a new cross-country database that reveals how delayed but aggressive monetary responses can generate low-cost disinflation. Satyajit Chatterjee, Dean Corbae, Kyle Dempsey, and José-Victor Ríos-Rull explore the bidirectional relationship between credit scores and inequality over the life cycle, demonstrating through a dynamic general equilibrium model how full information credit scoring systems can improve welfare outcomes. In a keynote address commemorating the conference anniversary, Olivier Blanchard assesses the evolution of macroeconomic research over four decades, and finds substantial methodological convergence.

A comprehensive survey of the evolution of market design over the past three decades.

In the mid-1990s, the first Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction and the redesign of the National Residency Matching Program collectively helped to jumpstart the field of market design. Since then, extensive research has improved auction design and broken new conceptual ground in addressing multi-agent matching problems. This volume summarizes key discoveries and advances in market design over the past three decades and explores contemporary challenges—from climate policy and electricity markets to AI-mediated exchanges and hospital resource allocation.

Contributors examine how to design efficient, incentive-compatible mechanisms that are robust to shifting conditions and increasing complexity. They consider a wide variety of applications that could benefit from the market design viewpoint, such as environmental markets, school choice, and organ exchange. Together, the chapters illustrate the important interactions between economic theory, computational tools, and institutional insight.

This book is a collection of ten essays with discussant commentaries originating from an October 1993 conference at the University of Michigan. Aiming to push international trade theory beyond traditional comparative static analysis, the volume focuses on dynamic modeling, endogenizing trade policy, and analyzing complex interactions among countries, governments, and eco-endogenizing. The collected papers tackle a diverse array of modern economic topics, including complexity theory applied to transport costs and trade structure (Paul Krugman), game-theoretic frameworks examining protectionist lobbying (Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman) and results-oriented trade sanctions (Mark Cronshaw and James Markusen), the "Bicycle theory" of gradual trade liberalisation (Robert Staiger), rules of origin as protectionist mechanisms within free trade areas like NAFTA (Kala Krishna and Anne Krueger), technological dynamics and comparative advantage shifts (Michihiro Ohyama and Ronald Jones), and export subsidisation case studies (Dani Rodrik). The title is a stimulating and forward-looking contribution that demonstrates how international trade theory is evolving to address multifaceted real-world challenges.

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.