Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

• 1. Introduction

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  The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity launched in 1970 with a simple but ambitious idea: take the best academic economists in the country and point them directly at the problems the world was actually facing. Not theoretical puzzles, but real-world policy questions with real consequences for real people. The journal's founders, Arthur Okun and George Perry, believed that rigorous economic analysis and practical policymaking did not have to live in separate worlds. What they built would attract Nobel Prize winners, Federal Reserve chairs, and some of the most consequential economic minds of the past half century. How does a twice-yearly conference journal become the venue where former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke reflects on the decision not to rescue Lehman Brothers? How does a single paper on mortality in the white working class get cited across national newspapers and reshape how policymakers think about addiction and despair? The answers lie in what BPEA chose to be, and what it deliberately chose not to be.

• 2. Okun, Perry, and the Founding Idea

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  Arthur Okun and George Perry began publishing BPEA in 1970 with a clear editorial conviction: academic economists should not be permitted to stay safely abstract when the world needed their skills applied to actual policy. Alan Greenspan, who would later serve as Chair of the Federal Reserve, was among the contributors to that very first edition. The journal's format was distinctive from the start. Each issue compiled the proceedings of a conference held twice a year by the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. Papers ran at full length, accompanied by comments from two peer reviewers and a written summary of the broader conference discussion. That structure gave the journal an unusual quality: it was not just a collection of articles but a record of argument, pushback, and refinement. Okun died in 1980, and his death left a gap in the editorship. William C. Brainard stepped in alongside Perry, and the two co-edited the journal from 1980 through 2007.

• 3. Who Has Written Here

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  Twenty-three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics have contributed to BPEA as authors or discussants since 1970. That figure is not a retrospective honor; many of these economists published here before their Nobel recognition came. Robert J. Shiller, who received the Nobel in 2013, contributed a paper titled "Stock Prices and Social Dynamics" as early as 1984. Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims, both honored in 2011, each published work on monetary theory in BPEA during the 1970s and 1980s. Paul Krugman, laureate in 2008, contributed a paper in 1976 on flexible exchange rates and returned to the journal repeatedly over the following decades. William Nordhaus, recognized in 2018, published a paper on the allocation of energy resources in 1973 and contributed fourteen separate papers to BPEA over the course of his career. The range suggests that the journal was functioning as a serious venue for serious economists long before any particular contributor was decorated. Economist Justin Wolfers, a former editor, described BPEA as the most public policy-focused of all serious economics journals, and, among all public policy journals, the most serious economic analysis.

• 4. The Crisis Papers

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  Ben Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve during the financial collapse of 2008, contributed a paper to the Fall 2018 edition of BPEA to mark the tenth anniversary of that crisis. His argument, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, was that the credit-market panic which reached its peak when Lehman Brothers failed explains the severity of the 2007-09 recession more fully than the housing bust alone does. He wrote that when investors fled short-term financing markets in 2008, the panic on Wall Street spread outward through the broader economy. Bernanke also addressed in that paper the decision not to rescue Lehman Brothers and reflected on the consequences of that choice. That a sitting or former chair of the Federal Reserve would use a Brookings conference paper rather than a memoir or a congressional testimony as the venue to examine one of the most debated decisions in recent economic history says something about where the journal stood in the ecosystem of economic discourse. The Spring 2019 edition carried a paper titled "Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century" by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, who had received the Nobel Prize in 2015. The paper examined what the authors described as a divided America facing a crisis of suicide, overdoses, and diseases fueled by alcohol and drugs. The Washington Post cited the paper's finding that sickness and early death in the white working class could be rooted in poor job prospects for less-educated young people as they first enter the labor market, a situation that compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, and obesity.

• 5. What the Journal Covers and How

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  BPEA covers macroeconomic topics ranging from housing and business investment to fiscal and monetary policy, international capital flows, and environmental issues. The journal did briefly release an annual issue dedicated to microeconomic questions, but that experiment was dropped and the focus settled firmly on macroeconomic policy. Six full-length papers typically appear in each issue, each accompanied by comments from two peer reviewers and a conference discussion summary. The journal is released in hard copy after each conference, and all past editions are available freely online from the Brookings Institution's website. The editorial masthead has shifted over the decades. After Brainard and Perry stepped back in 2007, the journal was co-edited in 2008 by Douglas Elmendorf, N. Gregory Mankiw, and Harvard economist Lawrence H. Summers. David Romer and Justin Wolfers held the editorship from 2009 through 2015. Since 2016, Janice C. Eberly and James H. Stock have served as co-editors. Robert Solow, who received the Nobel in 1987, contributed a paper as recently as 2015 titled "Deciphering the fall and rise in the net capital share," which suggests the journal has sustained its ability to attract economists of the first rank across more than four decades of publication.