Macroeconomic Research, Present and Past

Abstract

How is macroeconomic research conducted and what is it trying to accomplish? We explore these questions using information gleaned from 1,894 articles published in 10 leading journals. The emphasis on quantitative, computation-intensive theory-based analysis has grown over the past 40 years, while the use of econometric methods to test economic hypotheses has diminished. Applied micro techniques and micro data have displaced time series methods. Market imperfections are pervasive and financial frictions have received increasing attention in the past 10 years. The frequency with which non-macro JEL codes appear in macro articles indicates a great deal of overlap between macroeconomics and other fields. (JEL A14, B41, C10, C18, E00, E10)