The brookings panel on economic activity held its eighty-fifth conference in Washington, D.C., on April 10 and 11, 2008. For this conference-our first as editors of the journal-we selected papers on a range of topics central to macroeconomics and economic policy: the relationship between economic growth and people's subjective well-being; the effect of international trade on wages; the appropriate role of policies designed to strengthen local economies; macroeconomic crises and asset pricing; the impact of political constraints on the success of economic policy reform; and the behavior of financial markets during the approach of world wars. This issue of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity presents the six papers from the conference, comments by the formal discussants, and synopses of the discussions of the papers by conference participants.
展开▼
