De Grauwe, Paul: Lectures on behavioral macroeconomicsVIII, 160pp. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2012. ￡26.55

摘要

Macroeconomics has been strongly criticized in the recent years since the beginning of the Great Recession. The main points of criticism have been mentioned many times: the profession's inability to predict the crisis, the difficulties in explaining its severity, or in understanding the details of its transmission mechanism, and last not least the undeniable perplexity with which macroeconomists currently watch the slow speed of recovery in many countries. Paul de Grauwe takes this perception of themacroeconomic crisis as a crisis of macroeconomic theory as his starting point. His book is written as an attack on the mainstream of current business cycle models in the DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) tradition, and more specifically on the New Keynesian Macroeconomics (NKM, henceforth) paradigm. In particular, he criticizes the common assumption of rational expectations and the dependence of the model dynamics on exogenous shocks. His own view is that limitations of cognitive abilitieslead economic agents to use heuristic rules for forecasting, and that these can lead, in the aggregate, to boom and bust cycles that are not caused by stochastic shocks to some exogenous variable, but develop from the very working of the expectational mechanism he proposes. Thus, in de Grauwe's own words, his book presents the elements of 'another macroeconomics that has the ambition of developing an endogenous explanation of the business cycle' (p. 125). His claim is that episodes like the Great Recession that must be attributed to largely mysterious shocks in mainstream models can readily be explained within his 'behavioral model', as he chooses to call his approach.