Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
This issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy is the second in the Rebuilding Macroeconomic Theory project. The papers in the first issue proposed specific improvements to the New-Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK-DSGE) framework, in response to the events of the 2008 crisis. This issue goes further. We, as editors, now argue that a new multiple-equilibrium and diverse (MEAD) paradigm is needed for macroeconomics. It will emphasize that economies can have more than one stable outcome, and study why. It will require using both toy models, which enable a quick, first-pass, intuitive understanding of a question, and policy models (aka structural economic models) which develop a detailed empirical understanding of the economy. We argue that the seminal IS/LM, Solow–Swan, Ramsey, Real Business Cycle, Taylor, and Clarida/Galí/Gertler models have all been toys, as is the benchmark NK-DSGE model. In the past the models have adapted as the questions changed, and the NK-DSGE model must now do this since it has failed to capture both the salient aspects of the lead-up to the 2008 crisis and the slow recovery afterwards. The way forward in the MEAD paradigm will be to start with simple models, ideally two-dimensional sketches, that explain mechanisms that can cause multiple equilibria. These mechanisms should then be incorporated into larger DSGE models in a new, multiple-equilibrium synthesis. All of this will need to be informed by closer fidelity to the data, drawing on lessons obtained from detailed work on policy models.