a home
for economists
who believe
macroeconomics
can be both coherent and stabilization policy-relevant
The GEM Project blog appears weekly (Fridays). Interested economists are invited to participate by submitting comments or writing blog entries.
There are a few rules. The subject matter must be related to macroeconomics and macroeconomists, especially in their grand struggle to construct models that are stabilization relevant and internally coherent. Blog entries should be 1,000 words or fewer, and author name and association are required.
These six blogs are the cliff-notes version of the GEM eBook. In bite-sized portions, they capture the essentials of Generalized Exchange Macroeconomics:
Macroeconomics today would be much more stabilization-relevant but for Arthur Okun’s untimely death in 1980. His posthumously published Prices and Quantities proposed a promising class of macro modeling centrally microfounded by intra-firm optimization. Absent his insight, standing, and powers of persuasion, …
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The GEM Project has a special interest in the on-going debate about undergraduate macro textbooks. In the generation that followed the New Keynesian seizure of the macro academy’s mainstream, their signature dynamic stochastic general-market-equilibrium theory (enriched with rational market frictions) …
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The most crucial government priority in the COVIRUS-19 pandemic is aggressively fostering the development of effective vaccines and therapeutic treatments. While stabilization policy-making does not directly contribute to the key objective, well-designed action on the macroeconomic front is critical to …
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When I began teaching labor economics at MIT in 1969, mainstream thinking in the field was dominated by a loosely organized school of economists who used their neoclassical training to investigate what went on inside large, specialized workplaces. Such information-challenged …
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I have been tinkering with the GEM Project’s rational-behavior model of extreme instability, looking at whether it can be usefully adapted to the CONVID-19 pandemic. (See Annable and Schechter, “Modeling Extreme Instability,” summarized earlier on this Blog.) Originally constructed during …
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Paul Samuelson was the greatest economist I ever met. I had the office directly above his in the Sloan Building at MIT. It was somehow comforting that he was down there, working. And it seemed that he was always down …
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The overriding objective of Robert Lucas’s theoretical contributions was to restore the primacy of rational behavior to macroeconomics. In his modeling, agents are coherently self-interested. In particular, they make cost-effective use of available information to inform their choices. The GEM …
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Great economists are not limited to model-builders making important contributions to economic theory. Economist policymakers who substantially enhance our collective well-being are eligible for inclusion in the Helping-Hand series.
No policymaker deserves being recognized as a great economist more than Ben …
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This week’s GEM helping hand is extended to the 1970 article by John Harris and Michael Todaro (hereafter H&T), “Migration, Unemployment, and Development: A Two Sector Analysis”. H&T were moved up in the planned order of game subjects in order …
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Providing the mainstream literature’s go-to explanation for trend macrodynamics in developed economies is Robert Solow’s (1956, 1957) neoclassical growth theory. Once a colleague of mine at MIT and co-founder of morale-centric Efficiency Wage Theory, Solow is best known for his …
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