The NBER Reporter 2016 Number 2: Books

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2015, Volume 30

Edited by Martin Eichenbaum and Jonathan A. Parker
Cloth $90.00

    This year, the NBER Macroeconomics Annual celebrates its 30th volume. The first two papers examine China's macroeconomic development. "Trends and Cycles in China's Macroeconomy," by Chun Chang, Kaiji Chen, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha, outlines the key characteristics of growth and business cycles in China. "Demystifying the Chinese Housing Boom," by Hanming Fang, Quanlin Gu, Wei Xiong, and Li-An Zhou, constructs a new house price index, showing that Chinese house prices have grown by ten percent per year over the past decade. The third paper, "External and Public Debt Crises," by Cristina Arellano, Andrew Atkeson, and Mark Wright, asks why there appear to be large differences across countries and subnational jurisdictions in the effect of rising public debts on economic outcomes. The fourth, "Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration," by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr, explains how the network structure of the U.S. economy propagates the effect of gross output productivity shocks across upstream and downstream sectors. The fifth and sixth papers investigate the usefulness of surveys of households' beliefs for understanding economic phenomena. "Expectations and Investment," by Nicola Gennaioli, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, demonstrates that a chief financial officer's expectations of a firm's future earnings growth is related to both the planned and actual future investment of that firm. "Declining Desire to Work and Downward Trends in Unemployment and Participation," by Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura, shows that an increasing number of prime-age Americans who are not in the labor force report no desire to work and that this decline accelerated during the second half of the 1990s.

Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 30

Edited by Jeffrey R. Brown
Cloth $60.00

    The research papers in volume 30 of Tax Policy and the Economy make significant contributions to the academic literature in public finance and provide important conceptual and empirical input to policy design. In the first paper, Gerald Carlino and Robert Inman consider whether state-level fiscal policies create spillovers for neighboring states and how federal stimulus can internalize these externalities. The second paper, by NathanielHendren, presents a new framework for evaluating the welfare consequences of tax policy changes and explains how the key parameters needed to implement this framework can be estimated. The third paper, a collaborative effort by several academic and U.S. Treasury economists, documents the dramatic increase in pass-through businesses, including partnerships and S-corporations, over the last thirty years. It notes that these entities now generate more than half of all U.S. business income. The fourth paper examines property tax compliance using a pseudo-randomized experiment in Philadelphia in which those who owed taxes received supplemental letters regarding their tax delinquency. The research explores what types of communication lead to higher rates of tax payment. In the fifth paper, Jeffrey Clemens discusses cross-program budgetary spillovers of minimum wage regulations. Severin Borenstein and Lucas Davis, the authors of the sixth paper, study the distributional effects of income tax credits for clean energy.