Editorial

Abstract

NBER’s 33rd Annual Conference on Macroeconomics brought together leading scholars to present, discuss, and debate six research papers on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. In addition, Ragu Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund, delivered a thought-provoking after-dinner talk comparing the economic institutions in India and China and drawing out their implications for the economic growth potential of each country. Finally, we had a special panel session on the macroeconomic effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, moderated by NBER President James Poterba and featuring three leading experts in this area: Wendy Edelberg, associate director for economic analysis at the Congressional Budget Office; Kent Smetters, Boettner Chair Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School; and Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. Video recordings of the presentations of the papers, summaries of the papers by the authors, and the lunchtime panel discussion are all accessible on the web page of the NBER Annual Conference on Macroeconomics. These videos make a useful complement to this volume and make the content of the conference more widely accessible. This conference volume contains edited versions of the six papers presented at the conference, each followed by two written comments by leading scholars and a summary discussion of the debates that followed each paper. The first paper in this year’s volume takes an important step in understanding the implications of an assumption that is commonly used in mainstreammacromodels: people routinely solve extremely complicated, infinite-horizon planning problems. This assumption is clearly wrong. So a key question is, When does this assumption lead to misleading con-