Editorial

Abstract

The NBER’s 35th Annual Conference on Macroeconomics brought together leading scholars to present, discuss, and debate six research papers on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. In addition, Jeremy Stein, former governor of the Federal Reserve, led a thoughtprovoking discussion on whether the financial system is safer now than it was prior to the Great Recession. Given the pandemic, the conference took place via Zoom. Video recordings of the presentations of the papers and the after-dinner talk are all accessible on the web page of the NBER AnnualConference onMacroeconomics. These videosmake auseful complement to this volumeandmake the content of the conferencemorewidely accessible. This conference volume contains edited versions of the six papers presented at the conference. With one exception, each paper is followed by two written discussions by leading scholars and a summary of the debates that followed each paper. In the exception, there is only one written discussion. In their paper “Imperfect Macroeconomic Expectations: Evidence and Theory,” George-Marios Angeletos, Zhen Huo, and Karthik Sastry tackle a central question in macroeconomics: How should we model people’s expectations? For many years the answer to this question was widely viewed among mainstream macroeconomists as a settled issue. The answer was that people have rational expectations and common knowledge about the state of the economy. That consensus shattered under theweight of a large literature testing rational expectations, based in part on survey-based data. But what should we replace our simple benchmark model of expectations with? The paper by Angeletos et al.