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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.

Timely and authoritative research on the latest issues in tax policy.

Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research on taxation and government spending with both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest.

This volume presents new research on taxation, transfer programs, and related issues. Karen Dynan and Douglas Elmendorf examine the potential impact of automatic fiscal stabilizers on fiscal policy and economic activity. They find that a stabilizer providing direct payments could have produced faster unemployment decline after the Great Recession without raising inflation and much lower inflation after COVID-19 at the cost of a slower unemployment reduction. Alan J. Auerbach and William Gale review federal budget history and project the US debt-to-GDP ratio over the next 30 years, arguing that high projected debt could constrain future policy actions. They also explore possible fiscal consolidation policies. Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva survey Americans’ views of health care and insurance, finding broad agreement regarding costs, access, and efficiency but partisan gaps in policy preferences stemming from fundamentally different views of government scope rather than contrasting efficiency or fairness beliefs. Jonathan S. Hartley, Kevin A. Hassett, and Joshua D. Rauh analyze the corporate investment response to the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, finding a larger response than a number of earlier studies of investment sensitivity would have suggested. Joel Slemrod reviews historical taxation based on racial, religious, and gender identity and examines how tax policies that are not conditioned on any of these attributes can nevertheless differentially impact families as a result of systemic differences in their economic circumstances. Finally, Marianne Bitler, Jason Cook, Chloe N. East, Sonya R. Porter, and Laura Tiehen analyze geographic proximity effects on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation, finding that when a SNAP office opens, participation increases by about 20%. When an office closes, they find that participation drops by about 8% in the next two years.