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NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2020 presents research by leading scholars on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. George-Marios Angeletos, Zhen Huo, and Karthik Sastry ask how to model expectations without rational expectations. They find that in response to business cycle shocks, expectations underreact initially but eventually overshoot, which in their view favors models with dispersed, noisy information and overextrapolation of expectations. Next, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Nicholas Trachter contrast the patterns of rising aggregate firm market concentration with falling market concentration over time at the local level. Some associate rising concentration with less competition and more market power, but because most product markets are local, studying changes in local competition, as opposed to trends in aggregate competition, provides important insights. Adam Guren, Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson develop a novel econometric procedure to recover structural parameters using cross-region variation, for example, to estimate direct effects of housing wealth changes on individual household consumption. To avoid confounding direct and indirect effects, the authors isolate the direct effect of house price changes on consumption by using other estimates of demand multipliers from the local government spending literature to deflate estimates of the total effect of local consumption on local house prices. Peter Klenow and Huiyu Li examine the sources of reduced productivity growth by quantifying the contribution of innovation to economic growth. They find that young firms generate roughly half the productivity growth, most of the changes in productivity during the mid-1990s are accounted for by older firms, and most growth results from quality improvements on incumbents’ own products. In the fifth chapter, Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song use detailed micro panel data from the Social Security Administration to assess the progress women have made into the top 1% and top 0.1% of the income distribution over time. Finally, Joachim Hubmer, Per Krusell, and Anthony Smith Jr. explore the reasons for growing wealth inequality across the developed world. They argue that the significant drop in tax progressivity starting in the late 1970s was the most important source of growing wealth inequality in the United States. The sharp observed increases in earnings inequality and the falling labor share cannot account for the bulk of the increase in wealth inequality.
 

Since the early modern period, science has played an ever-growing role in healthcare, agriculture, the regulation of food and drink trades, and the standardization of nutrition guidelines. Yet until now, few studies had explored the historical processes through which scientific claims of knowledge gained the power to shape food supply chains and consumer choices. This volume of Osiris reveals how sciences of food have been informed by, and helped to shape in turn, an array of institutions, labor regimes, cultural practices, and ethical commitments.

The essays delve into a range of topics, from early modern dietetics and debates about cannibalism to modern ready-to-eat rations and Ayurvedic recipes, from analyses of hungry model organisms to the dining rituals of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their patrons. As Food Matters shows, the history of knowledge about food has always raised debates about the shifting definition and boundaries of expertise: between traditional recipes and experimental protocols; between domestic craft skill and laboratory procedure; between the management and redistribution of resources for the social body on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of individual bodies on the other. At a moment when the authority of science is being questioned by a variety of publics, Food Matters is a timely reminder that such tensions, always present in food-related domains, reflect broader historical developments through which science became a prevalent force in shaping all aspects of public and private life.

This volume presents six new studies on current topics in taxation and government spending. The first study looks at the costs of income tax filing, which have risen over time because of the numerous tax forms families have to fill out when filing their taxes and because of increased costs of itemizing deductions, and explores ways to simplify filing and reduce those costs. The second study investigates the design of income tax schedules when there is uncertainty about the way taxation affects household behavior. The third study provides new and comprehensive estimates of the impact of the US Earned Income Tax Credit on the employment of low-income men and women, finding that the large majority of the various expansions of that credit over the last forty years have increased employment of single mothers. The fourth study reviews the structure of business taxation in China and describes a number of tax distortions and potential inefficiencies in the system. The next paper considers how the Affordable Care Act has affected the health insurance and labor market choices of individuals who are between the ages of 60 and 64, and it finds increases in insurance coverage and reductions in employment for some groups. The last study considers how reimbursement rates for health care providers under various government insurance programs affect providers’ willingness to take on new patients and expand their patient capacity.