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David Romer
David Romer
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David Hibbard Romer (born March 13, 1958) is an American economist, the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a standard textbook in graduate macroeconomics as well as many influential economic papers, particularly in the area of New Keynesian economics. He is also the husband and close collaborator of Council of Economic Advisers former Chairwoman Christina Romer.

Key Information

Education and early career

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After graduating from Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1976, he obtained his bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton University in 1980 and graduated as the valedictorian of his class. Romer completed a 138-page long senior thesis "A Study of the Effects of Population on Development, with Applications to Japan."[2] Romer worked as a Junior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers from 1980 to 1981 before beginning his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he completed in 1985. A reduced version of his undergraduate thesis research was published in the Review of Economics and Statistics.[3] Upon completion of his doctorate, he started working as an assistant professor at Princeton University. In 1988 he moved to University of California, Berkeley and was promoted to full professor in 1993.

Research

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Romer's early research made him one of the leaders of the New Keynesian economics. Specifically, an influential paper with Laurence M. Ball, published in 1989, established that real rigidities (that is, stickiness in relative prices) can exacerbate nominal rigidities (that is, stickiness in nominal prices).[4]

Romer's most widely cited paper is "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth," coauthored with Gregory Mankiw and David N. Weil and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1992. The paper argues that the Solow growth model, once augmented to include a role for human capital, does a reasonably good job of explaining international differences in standards of living. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 25,000 times, making it one of the most cited articles in the field of economics.

In more recent work, Romer has worked with Christina Romer on fiscal and monetary policy from the 1950s to the present, using notes from the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the materials prepared by Fed staff to study how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions. His work suggests that some of the credit for the relatively stable economic growth in the 1950s should lie with good policy made by the Federal Reserve,[5] and that the members of the FOMC could at times have made better decisions by relying more closely on forecasts made by the Fed professional staff.[6]

Most recently, the Romers have focused on the impact of tax policy on government and general economic growth. This work looks at the historical record of US tax changes from 1945–2007, excluding "endogenous" tax changes made to fight recessions or offset the cost of new government spending. It finds that such "exogenous" tax increases, made for example to reduce inherited budget deficits, reduce economic growth (though by smaller amounts after 1980 than before).[7] Romer and Romer also find "no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending; indeed ... tax cuts may increase spending. The results also indicate that the main effect of tax cuts on the government budget is to induce subsequent legislated tax increases."[8]

Romer has also written papers on some unusual subjects for a macroeconomist, such as “Do Students Go to Class? Should They?”,[9] and “Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football.”[10]

Career

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Romer is a member of the American Economic Association Executive Committee, the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a three-time recipient of Berkeley's Graduate Economic Association's distinguished teaching and advising awards. Professor Romer is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee.[11]

Romer is the author of "Advanced Macroeconomics," a standard graduate macroeconomics text, now in its 5th edition.[12] He was an editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity from 2009 to Fall 2015 and, according to a January 2022 AEA announcement, will become the lead editor of the Journal of Economic Literature beginning July 2022.

Family

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Romer is married to Christina Romer, who was his classmate at MIT and is his colleague in the Economics Department at University of California, Berkeley. They have adjoining offices in the department,[13] and collaborate on much of their research.[14] The couple has three children together.

Romer has two brothers, Evan and Ted Romer. Greg Mankiw served as best man at their wedding (Romer served as best man at Mankiw's wedding).[15][16]

He is not related to the economist Paul Romer (the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).

Publications

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Books

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  • Romer, David (1996). Advanced Macroeconomics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • References

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    [edit]
    Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia
    from Grokipedia
    David H. Romer (born March 13, 1958) is an American economist specializing in macroeconomics, serving as the Herman Royer Professor Emeritus in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 1988 and advanced to full professor in 1993. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1980 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, followed by an assistant professorship at Princeton until 1988. Romer's seminal contributions include empirical testing of neoclassical growth models, notably co-authoring "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth" (1992) with N. Gregory Mankiw and David N. Weil, which augmented the Solow model with human capital to explain international income differences and influenced subsequent growth empirics. With his wife and collaborator Christina Romer, he constructed narrative-based measures of U.S. tax changes to identify fiscal shocks, estimating that tax increases significantly reduce output, providing causal evidence on fiscal policy multipliers independent of conventional econometric challenges. His research extends to monetary policy transmission, New Keynesian frameworks emphasizing nominal rigidities, and the macroeconomic effects of policy surprises, often leveraging historical and narrative identification for robust causal inference. Romer also authored the graduate textbook Advanced Macroeconomics, which integrates theoretical models with empirical evidence and has shaped pedagogical approaches in the field.

    Early Life and Education

    Family Background and Upbringing

    David Hibbard Romer was born on March 13, 1958. Biographical accounts of his parental lineage, siblings, or specific locales of childhood residence are absent from professional profiles, academic records, and public testimonies associated with his career. This scarcity reflects a focus in economic scholarship on intellectual contributions over personal history, with no verifiable indications of notable familial influences on his path to discernible in available documentation.

    Academic Training

    David Romer earned his A.B. in from in 1980. He graduated as of his class. Romer then pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received his Ph.D. in in 1985. His doctoral dissertation focused on , aligning with his subsequent research interests in macroeconomic policy.

    Professional Career

    Initial Academic Positions

    Following completion of his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, David Romer assumed his first academic position as an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, serving from 1985 to 1988. During this period, he also held a visiting scholar appointment at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1987 to 1988, which supported his early research on monetary policy and macroeconomic fluctuations. In 1988, Romer transitioned to the , initially as an acting in the Department of , a role he held until 1990. This appointment followed a brief visiting assistant professorship at MIT in 1988, reflecting his established connections within the MIT-Princeton academic network. He was promoted to at Berkeley in 1990, marking the consolidation of his mid-career trajectory in macroeconomic research. These early positions enabled Romer to develop foundational contributions to New Keynesian models, building on his dissertation work under supervision at MIT.

    Berkeley Professorship and Ongoing Roles

    Romer joined the faculty of the in 1988 as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. He was promoted to in 1990 and to in 1993. In 2000, he was appointed the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy, an endowed chair he held until 2023. During his tenure at Berkeley, Romer served as chair of the Department of Economics from 2019 to 2020. He has also held administrative roles such as vice chair for personnel and graduate studies. Romer's teaching responsibilities have included undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomics, with emphasis on monetary and fiscal policy. His research output during this period continued to focus on empirical macroeconomics, including monetary policy identification and fiscal multipliers, often collaborating with students and colleagues at Berkeley. In 2023, Romer transitioned to of the Graduate School at Berkeley, a status recognizing emeritus-level faculty who remain active in and graduate mentoring without full teaching loads. He retains affiliation with the department and continues to supervise doctoral students, as evidenced by recent Ph.D. committees. This ongoing role supports Berkeley's graduate program in , where he contributes to dissertation supervision on topics like empirical monetary analysis.

    Research Contributions

    Foundations in New Keynesian Economics

    David Romer's foundational work in centered on providing microeconomic rationales for nominal rigidities, particularly sticky prices, to reconcile Keynesian demand-side fluctuations with and optimizing agents. In his 1993 survey "The New Keynesian Synthesis," Romer outlined how these models incorporated , where firms face downward-sloping demand curves and set prices above , leading to potential non-neutrality of when adjustment costs or strategic complementarities prevent frequent repricing. This approach addressed new classical critiques by emphasizing that small frictions in price-setting could generate substantial real effects on output, especially when amplified by underlying real rigidities in factor markets. A key contribution was Romer's 1987 model of sticky prices as a coordination , where firms' decisions to adjust prices depend on expectations of aggregate price changes by competitors. In this framework, even modest costs of changing prices can lead to multiple equilibria: one with widespread adjustment and minimal real effects from monetary shocks, and another with synchronized inaction, magnifying output responses. The model demonstrated that strategic complementarities—firms benefit from adjusting only if others do—arise naturally in monopolistically competitive settings, providing a game-theoretic microfoundation for observed price sluggishness without relying solely on or exogenous menu costs. Collaborating with Laurence Ball, Romer further advanced these foundations by integrating real rigidities, such as countercyclical markups or labor market imperfections, which enhance the propagation of nominal shocks. Their 1988 analysis showed that real rigidities reduce the elasticity of supply to monetary disturbances, making small nominal frictions sufficient to produce large, persistent deviations from , thus bolstering the case for activist stabilization policy. This complemented menu-cost models by explaining why curves are upward-sloping and why retains potency in the short run, influencing subsequent frameworks. Romer's editorial efforts solidified these ideas through co-editing New Keynesian Economics, Volume 1: Imperfect Competition and Sticky Prices (1991) with N. Gregory Mankiw, which compiled seminal papers on how market power and adjustment frictions underpin Keynesian results. The volume highlighted empirical evidence for price stickiness, such as infrequent adjustments in consumer and producer prices, and theoretical extensions linking these to welfare losses from inefficient resource allocation. These contributions established Romer as a pivotal figure in shifting macroeconomic debate toward models where nominal rigidities emerge endogenously, paving the way for policy-oriented New Keynesian analysis.

    Monetary Policy Shocks and Identification

    David Romer, in collaboration with , advanced the identification of shocks by developing methods that leverage narrative evidence from documents to isolate exogenous changes in policy not driven by contemporaneous or anticipated economic conditions. Their approach addresses longstanding challenges in empirical , where standard (VAR) models often suffer from simultaneity bias and price puzzles, leading to underestimated policy effects. By focusing on surprises in the intended around (FOMC) meetings from 1969 to 1996, Romer and Romer constructed a shock series orthogonalized to the Fed's own forecasts of , output, and , thereby minimizing endogeneity. The core innovation in Romer and Romer's 2004 framework involves regressing changes in the intended funds rate—derived from archival records of FOMC directives and projections—on the Federal Reserve's real-time forecasts to extract residuals interpreted as unanticipated policy actions. This yields a measure of shocks that exhibits persistence but avoids the forward-looking contamination common in high-frequency identification strategies. Empirical estimates using this series reveal substantial real effects: a 100-basis-point tightening shock reduces industrial production by approximately 2.5% after two years and increases by 0.7 percentage points, effects roughly twice as large as those from recursive VARs. Inflation responses align with theory, declining without the counterintuitive rise seen in some structural models. Building on earlier narrative techniques from Romer and Romer (1989), which classified contractionary episodes from FOMC minutes, the 2004 method refines identification by incorporating quantitative funds rate intentions, enhancing precision for postwar U.S. . Subsequent extensions, including updates to the series through 2007 and beyond, confirm the robustness of these shocks in explaining fluctuations, with monetary non-neutrality persisting for several quarters. Romer's contributions underscore the value of institutional detail in , influencing by demonstrating that discretionary Fed actions, when exogenous, exert potent influence on real activity without relying on questionable zero restrictions.

    Empirics of Economic Growth

    In 1992, Romer co-authored "A Contribution to the Empirics of " with N. Gregory Mankiw and David N. Weil, which tested the consistency of the Solow neoclassical growth model with cross-country data on living standards. The analysis augmented the standard Solow framework by incorporating accumulation, using average years of male secondary schooling attainment in 1960 as a proxy for investment rates across 98 countries. Regressions on log GDP in 1960 and its growth to 1985, alongside data on physical investment rates, , and schooling, yielded parameter estimates aligning with theory: physical capital's income share at approximately 0.31, 's at 0.28, and implicitly capturing residuals. The model's predictions held up empirically, accounting for about 78% of the variance in log GDP per capita levels across countries, compared to under 40% for the basic Solow model without human capital. It supported conditional convergence, where poorer economies grow faster than richer ones when conditioning on similar steady-state fundamentals like investment and population growth rates, with an estimated convergence speed of 1.9% to 2.4% per year depending on specification. This work challenged endogenous growth models' emphasis on scale effects and externalities by demonstrating that augmented exogenous growth frameworks could explain observed income differences without invoking increasing returns at the aggregate level. Romer further contributed to growth empirics in a 1999 collaboration with Jeffrey A. Frankel, "Does Trade Cause Growth?", which addressed endogeneity in the trade-income nexus using instrumental variables derived from geographic determinants of bilateral trade flows. The study constructed predicted trade shares based on countries' latitudes, longitudes, land areas, and common borders—factors exogenous to income levels but influencing trade costs—for a sample of 127 countries circa 1985. Instrumental variable regressions estimated that a one-standard-deviation increase in the trade-to-GDP ratio (about 22 percentage points) raised log real GDP per capita by 0.51 to 1.18 log points, implying trade's causal effect accounts for roughly one-third of the income gap between high- and low-trade countries. These findings bolstered arguments for trade openness as a driver of and , distinct from reverse causation or omitted variables like institutions, though subsequent critiques noted potential correlations between instruments and omitted confounders such as prevalence. Romer's empirical approaches emphasized rigorous identification and model augmentation to align theory with data, influencing subsequent cross-country growth regressions.

    Recent Analyses of Inflation and Policy Frameworks

    In a 2024 analysis published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, David Romer and assessed the Federal Reserve's 2020 framework and its implications for responding to the post-pandemic surge. They contended that the framework's adoption of flexible average —which permitted to exceed the 2% target to compensate for prior shortfalls—and its instruction to prioritize remedying employment shortfalls over excesses systematically downplayed inflationary pressures in 2021. Examination of (FOMC) minutes and speeches revealed that officials frequently invoked the framework to justify expectations of transitory , leading to delayed increases until March 2022, despite core PCE reaching 3.3% by June 2021. The Romers' evidence from policy documents indicated that the framework fostered asymmetric risk assessments, with greater emphasis on avoiding premature tightening than on upside risks, contributing to peaking at 7% on core PCE in 2022. They estimated that earlier hikes aligned with pre- norms could have moderated the episode's severity, drawing on models of historical policy responses. For the Fed's ongoing framework review, they advocated reinstating symmetric responses to deviations in and , arguing that the changes reduced policy flexibility without commensurate benefits in anchoring expectations. Complementing this, Romer's 2024 co-authored study on historical U.S. disinflations, published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, identified commitment as the pivotal factor in achieving low with limited economic costs. Analyzing episodes from the onward via narrative identification of policy intentions from archival records, the Romers classified commitments as weak, moderate, or strong based on explicit rhetoric and actions signaling priority. Strong commitments, as under in 1979–1982, correlated with reductions of 4–5 percentage points within 18 months and output losses below 2%, whereas weaker ones prolonged high or induced deeper recessions. This historical lens informed Romer's critique of modern frameworks, emphasizing that credible, forward-looking signals—rather than mechanical rules—enhance disinflation efficacy by shaping expectations. The analysis highlighted episodes like the 1990s, where moderate commitment under sustained low inflation amid productivity gains, contrasting with the 1960s–1970s failures under ambiguous mandates. Applied to recent policy, it suggests frameworks should prioritize unambiguous anti-inflation resolve to minimize reliance on output sacrifices, with empirical tests confirming commitment strength explains 60–70% of variance in disinflation outcomes.

    Publications

    Textbooks and Monographs

    David Romer's primary , Advanced , was first published in by McGraw-Hill and has become a standard reference for graduate-level macroeconomic instruction. The text systematically presents core macroeconomic theories, including classical, Keynesian, and real models, while integrating and quantitative analysis to address key questions such as the determinants of output fluctuations and the effects of monetary and . Subsequent editions have incorporated developments like New Keynesian frameworks and responses to economic crises; the second edition appeared in 2001, the third in 2006, the fourth in 2012, and the fifth in 2019, reflecting updates on topics including the and post-crisis policy responses. In addition to textbooks, Romer has co-edited scholarly monographs on macroeconomic policy. A notable example is Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy, published in 1997 by the as part of the Studies in Business Cycles series, which he edited with Christina D. Romer. This volume compiles conference papers examining the rationale for policies, their implementation across countries, and associated economic costs, drawing on historical data from episodes like the U.S. Volcker disinflation of the early . The work emphasizes empirical assessments of credibility's role in minimizing output losses during inflation reductions, influencing subsequent research on independence and policy design.

    Selected Journal Articles and Working Papers

    David Romer's journal publications and working papers have advanced empirical methods in macroeconomics, emphasizing narrative identification of policy shocks and rigorous testing of theoretical models. His collaborations, often with Christina D. Romer, have yielded influential analyses of fiscal and monetary policy effects, drawing on historical data to isolate exogenous variations. A foundational contribution is "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth," co-authored with N. Gregory Mankiw and David N. Weil and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May 1992. The paper augments the Solow growth model by incorporating human capital alongside physical capital and finds empirical support for its predictions using cross-country data from 1960–1985, including conditional convergence where poorer economies grow faster when controlling for factor accumulations and population growth. This work has been widely cited for bridging theory and international evidence on long-run growth determinants. In , "Does Monetary Policy Matter? A New Test in the Spirit of and Schwartz," co-authored with Christina D. Romer and appearing in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual in 1989, develops a approach to identify monetary shocks from records between 1930 and 1987. It estimates that contractionary shocks reduce output significantly, with effects persisting for years, challenging earlier findings of and establishing a for non-recursive identification strategies. On , "The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," co-authored with Christina D. Romer and published in the American Economic Review in June 2010, constructs a measure of U.S. changes from 1945–2007 motivated by legislative intent rather than forecasts. The reveals that increases reduce GDP by about 3% over three years, supporting Keynesian multipliers exceeding unity in the short run while highlighting deficits' role in crowding out private investment less than previously thought. Recent work includes the presidential address "Does Monetary Policy Matter? The Narrative Approach after 35 Years," co-authored with Christina D. Romer and published in the in June 2023. Reviewing extensions of the 1989 method through 2000, it confirms robust negative effects of tightening on output and employment, with no evidence of long-run neutrality, and critiques alternatives for bias in shock identification. Among working papers, "In Praise of Confidence Intervals" (NBER No. 26672, January 2020) advocates for reporting intervals over point estimates in empirical , arguing they better convey uncertainty and prevent overconfidence in stylized facts from noisy data. Another, "NBER Recession Dates: Strengths, Weaknesses, and a Modern Upgrade" (co-authored with Christina D. Romer, August 2020), evaluates Dating Committee methods using and proposes enhancements incorporating modern indicators like employment diffusion.

    Reception and Critiques

    Academic Influence and Citations

    David Romer's scholarly output has significantly shaped modern macroeconomics, as evidenced by his publications accumulating over 55,000 citations and an h-index of 50 according to aggregated academic metrics. His most cited work, the 1992 paper "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth" co-authored with N. Gregory Mankiw and David N. Weil, has received more than 10,000 citations and provided augmented empirical support for the Solow growth model by incorporating human capital, influencing subsequent cross-country growth regressions. Another highly cited contribution, "Does Trade Cause Growth?" (1999), with over 3,900 citations, rigorously tested causal links between openness and economic expansion using instrumental variables, challenging earlier correlations and informing trade policy debates. In the realm of , Romer's collaborative research with Christina D. Romer on narrative identification strategies has established benchmarks for empirical analysis. Their 2004 paper, "A New Measure of Monetary Shocks: Derivation and Implications," introduced a refined shocks series based on documents, enabling cleaner estimates of policy transmission and cited extensively in structural studies. Similarly, the 1989 paper "Does Monetary Policy Matter? A New Test in the Spirit of and Schwartz" demonstrated non-neutrality effects through historical narrative shocks, bolstering evidence against monetarist critiques and accumulating substantial citations in debates over policy efficacy. Romer's theoretical advancements in have exerted foundational influence, particularly through his 1993 Journal of Economic Perspectives article "The New Keynesian Synthesis," which synthesized microfoundations for nominal rigidities—such as menu costs and —into dynamic general equilibrium frameworks, paving the way for DSGE models prevalent in academic and research. This synthesis reconciled Keynesian insights with , impacting the evolution of inflation-output trade-off models and cited in over 200 subsequent works by 2023. His graduate textbook Advanced Macroeconomics (first edition 1996, latest 2019), a standard reference, has further amplified his reach by elucidating these models for advanced students, with editions integrated into curricula worldwide and referenced in thousands of empirical and theoretical extensions. Overall, Romer's citation profile underscores his role in bridging and empirics, with disproportionate impact in monetary and growth subfields; for instance, his fiscal shocks measure in the 2010 paper with has over 1,000 citations and informed multiplier estimates during post-2008 policy analyses. These metrics reflect sustained academic engagement rather than transient trends, as his methods remain embedded in econometric toolkits despite critiques of mainstream assumptions from Austrian or market-monetarist perspectives.

    Policy Implications and Applications

    Romer's development of the identification approach for shocks, introduced in collaboration with in 1989, has enabled more reliable estimation of policy effects on output and , circumventing endogeneity problems in traditional models. This method, which leverages contemporaneous FOMC documents to date exogenous contractions, reveals that such shocks reduce industrial production by approximately 2-3% within a year and increase by 1-2 percentage points, informing central banks' assessments of transmission mechanisms. Subsequent updates confirm these effects persist over 35 years of data, with implications for calibrating responses to avoid prolonged downturns. In applications, Romer's emphasis on monetary policy's potency counters historical misconceptions of its ineffectiveness, as evidenced by inaction during the and 1970s , where beliefs in policy irrelevance exacerbated outcomes. His empirical work underscores the Federal Reserve's role in postwar recoveries, attributing expansions more to monetary easing than fiscal measures, guiding modern frameworks toward proactive stabilization. New Keynesian models incorporating Romer's sticky-price foundations justify and forward guidance, as adopted by the Fed and ECB, by demonstrating how nominal rigidities amplify real effects of rate changes. Recent analyses highlight applications to inflation dynamics: Romer's critique of the Fed's 2020 framework, which prioritized over strict control, argues it delayed aggressive tightening amid 2021-2022 price surges, contributing to deviations from the 2% target. This suggests revisions emphasizing symmetric responses to prevent undershooting, with evidence from narrative shocks showing prior tightening episodes successfully curbed without severe recessions. On , lessons from the 2008 crisis, drawn from Romer's review, affirm higher-than-expected multipliers for stimulus under zero lower bounds, supporting targeted deficits during liquidity traps while cautioning against persistence in normal times.

    Criticisms from Non-Mainstream Perspectives

    Heterodox economists contend that the New Keynesian framework advanced by David Romer, particularly through his models incorporating price stickiness via menu costs and , deviates fundamentally from Keynesian principles by reinstating classical assumptions like , where supply inherently creates demand, and the in the long run. Frederic S. Lee argues this approach assumes optimizing agents operating under full information and rational foresight, sidelining Keynes's emphasis on radical uncertainty, animal spirits, and the determination of output by rather than flexible price adjustments to equilibrium. Such models, Lee notes, treat as a short-run disequilibrium resolvable by tweaks, ignoring how demand deficiencies can persistently shape supply capacities and long-run potential output. Austrian school economists implicitly critique Romer's identification strategies for shocks—such as vector autoregressions assuming exogenous policy innovations—as overlooking the endogenous nature of through and distortions, which they view as the root cause of malinvestments and cycle amplification rather than mere nominal rigidities. While direct references to Romer are sparse in , his justification for activist stabilization policies aligns with what Austrians like those at the decry as overreliance on management, which prolongs distortions instead of allowing market processes to restore coordination. These perspectives prioritize of intertemporal misallocation over Romer's focus on microfounded frictions like small menu costs generating large real effects through strategic complementarities. Post-Keynesian and other heterodox views further challenge Romer's rationalizations for observed price rigidity, asserting that flexibility itself can exacerbate instability via debt-deflation dynamics or profit squeezes, inverting the New Keynesian that stickiness alone impedes efficient . Empirical work in these traditions, emphasizing institutional and historical contingencies over timeless optimizing equilibria, questions the universality of Romer's calibrated models, which underplay class conflicts, financial fragility, and the non-neutrality of in open economies.

    References

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