Eighteenth Annual Conference on Macroeconomics.

• Position: Conferences - April 4-5, 2003

The NBER's Eighteenth Annual Conference on Macroeconomics, organized by Mark Gertler, NBER and New York University and Kenneth Rogoff, NBER and Harvard University, was held in Cambridge on April 4 and 5. The program was:

Susanto Basu, NBER and University of Michigan; John G. Fernald, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and Nick Oulton and Sylaja Srinivasan, Bank of England, "The Case of Missing Productivity Growth, or: Why Has Productivity Accelerated in the United States but not the United Kingdom?"

Discussants: Olivier J. Blanchard, NBER and MIT, and Gianluca Violante, New York University

Dirk Krueger, NBER and Stanford University and Fabrizio Perri, NBER and New York University, "On the Welfare Consequences of the Increase in Inequality in the United States"

Discussants: Steven J. Davis, NBER and University of Chicago, and Kjetil Storesletten, Institute for International Economics

Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, NBER and Northwestern University, "Behavioral Finance: An Impartial Assessment, or: Does Irrationality Disappear with Wealth? Evidence from Expectations and Actions"

Discussants: John Y. Campbell, NBER and Harvard University, and Owen Lamont, NBER and University of Chicago

N. Gregory Mankiw, NBER and Harvard University; Ricardo Reis, Harvard University; and Justin Wolfers, Stanford University, "Disagreement About Inflation Expectations"

Discussants: Robert King, NBER and Boston University, and John Williams, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Pierpaolo Benigno, New York University and Michael Woodford, NBER and Princeton University, "Optimal Targeting Rules for Monetary and Fiscal Policy"

Discussants: Stefania Albanesi, New York University, and Marios Angeletos, NBER and MIT

Arminio Fraga, Ilan Goldfajn, and Andre Minella, Central Bank of Brazil, "Inflation Targeting in Emerging Market Economics"

Discussants: Frederic S. Mishkin, NBER and Columbia University, and Robert E. Hall, NBER and Stanford University

The United Kingdom experienced an information and communications technology (ICT) investment boom in the 1990s in parallel with the United States, but measured total factor productivity (TFP) there has decelerated rather than accelerated in recent years. Basu, Fernald, Oulton, and Srinivasan ask whether ICT can explain the divergent TFP performance in the two countries. As a "general purpose technology," measured TFP should rise in ICT-using sectors (reflecting either unobserved accumulation of intangible organizational capital...