Editorial

Abstract

The NBER’s 36th Annual Conference on Macroeconomics brought together leading scholars to present, discuss, and debate five research papers on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. In addition, we included a panel discussion on the cost associated with expanding the size of government debt. Raghu Rajan moderated the panel, which included CarmenReinhart, RichardReis, andLarry Summers. Given the pandemic, the conference took place via Zoom. Video recordings of the presentations of the papers and the panel discussion are accessible on the web page of the NBER Annual Conference on Macroeconomics. These videos make a useful complement to this volume andmake the conference’s content more widely accessible. This conference volume contains edited versions of the five papers presented at the conference, each followed by two written discussions by leading scholars and a summary of the debates that followed each paper. How the labor market evolves during a recession and its subsequent recovery is a key question inmacroeconomics. During a recession,many workers are displaced from their employers. Over time, these workers are absorbed back into the labor force. So at the onset of a recession, the unemployment rate rises sharply, whereas the unemployment rate falls slowly during the recovery. In their paper “Why Has the US Economy Recovered So Consistently from Every Recession in the Past 70 Years?” Robert Hall and Marianna Kudlyak explore the underpinnings of unemployment dynamics across recessions. Hall and Kudlyak start their paper by documenting a set of