NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics 2012

The distinguished International Seminar on Macroeconomics has met annually in Europe for over thirty years. The topics covered in this year's volume fall into four categories: exchange rates, global business cycles, the financial crisis, and unemployment and the Great Recession. The chapters included look at a model developed to analyze the use of capital-account policies to peg the real exchange rate and assess various models for forecasting the Euro to US dollar exchange rate during the recent financial crisis. Other chapters draw on panel data from OECD countries to characterize and explain movements in house prices; explore central issues to the financial crisis, such as its impact on trade flows and the desirability and effects of official bailouts; and study the unemployment experience during the Great Recession, its propagation and the sluggish road to recovery.