In this episode, we speak with John Taylor of Stanford University and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago, who organized a recent conference that brought together scholars from around the world to write the second volume of the Handbook of Macroeconomics.
First written 15 years ago, the handbook was designed to be a comprehensive resource on the important concepts governing the course of macroeconomic research. But much has changed about how we understand the macroeconomy in the past 15 years.
John and Harald gathered experts from across the research spectrum in order to produce a new volume that reflected the course of macroeconomic analysis as it stands today: in the wake of a financial crisis we’re still trying to understand, as well as the advent of advanced computational techniques and vast, untapped datasets.
The conference took place in two parts–the first hosted by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in early April 2015, followed by a second three day conference here at the University of Chicago several weeks later.
At the conclusion of that second conference, John and Harald sat down with us to explain what it means to collaboratively write a comprehensive handbook, and what they learned about the current state of macroeconomic research in the process.