Macroeconomic Lessons from the Great Deviation

摘要

Congratulations to the National Bureau of Economic Research on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Macroeconomics Annual conference series, and thanks to all the editors over the years—Stanley Fischer, Olivier Blanchard, Julio Rotemberg, Ben Bernanke, Daron Acemoglu, Kenneth Rogoff, and Michael Woodford—who have consistently encouraged research with a strong empirical content and policy relevance. My remarks tonight focus on the macroeconomic aspects of the financial crisis. Most of my research over the past few years has been on the financial crisis. My approach has been empirical, examining data on interest rate spreads, money supply, consumption, and investment and simulating empirical models using the discipline of counterfactuals— basically the same approach used in the papers presented at the NBER Macroeconomics Annual conferences over the years.