The NBER Reporter 2011 Number 1: Conferences

The 23rd NBER-TCER-CEPR Conference on "Fiscal Policy and Crisis" took place in Tokyo on December 16-17, 2010. These conferences are sponsored jointly by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, NBER, and the Tokyo Center for Economic Research. Organizers Shin-ichi Fukuda, University of Tokyo and TCER, Takeo Hoshi, University of California, San Diego and NBER, and Eric Leeper, Indiana University and NBER, chose these papers to discuss:

• Troy Davig, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and Eric Leeper, "Temporarily Unstable Government Debt and Inflation"

• Shin-ichi Fukuda and Junji Yamada, University of Tokyo and TCER, "'Stock Price Targeting' and Fiscal Deficit in Japan: Why was Japan's Fiscal Deficit Accelerated in the Lost Decades?"

• Masaya Sakuragawa, Keio University, and Kaoru Hosono, Gakushuin University, "Fiscal Sustainability in Japan"

• David Cook, HKUST, and Michael B. Devereux, University of British Columbia and NBER, and "Cooperative Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound"

• Arata Ito and Tsutomu Watanabe, Hitotsubashi University, and Tomoyoshi Yabu, Keio University, "Estimating Fiscal Policy Rules for Japan, US, and UK"

• Stefano Eusepi, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Bruce Preston, Columbia University and NBER, "The Maturity Structure of Debt, Monetary Policy, and Expectations Stabilization"

• Takero Doi, Keio University and TCER; Takeo Hoshi; and Tatsuyoshi Okimoto, Hitotsubashi University, "Japanese Government Debt and Sustainability of Fiscal Policy"

Summaries of these papers may be found here.

On December 19 and 20, 2010 the NBER, along with India's National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), sponsored a meeting that united NBER researchers with a number of economists from Indian universities, research institutions, and government departments. NBER Research Associates Abhijit Banerjee of MIT and Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago organized the conference jointly with Suman Bery and Anil Sharma of NCAER.

The NBER participants, in addition to the organizers, were: Alberto Alesina, Amitabh Chandra, David Cutler, and Martin Feldstein, Harvard University; Mikhail Golosov and Nancy Qian, Yale University; Bengt Holmstrom and Scott Stern, MIT; Chang-Tai Hsieh and Steven Kaplan, University of Chicago; Anne O. Krueger, Johns Hopkins University; and NBER Board member John Lipsky of the International Monetary Fund.

The topics discussed included global growth and adjustment, the state of the Indian economy, development strategies, and the politics of sustaining growth.