11th Annual Macroeconomic Policy Research Workshop at MNB: Microeconomic Behavior and its Macroeconomic Implications During the Financial Crisis

On September 6–7, 2012, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank hosted the 11th Macroeconomic Research Workshop organized jointly with the CEPR. The title of the workshop was ‘Microeconomic Behavior and its Macroeconomic Implications During the Financial Crisis’. The event was highly topical, as the policymakers try to understand the impact of the financial crisis on different economic agents and tailor their response to it. The keynote speakers of the event were professors Christopher D. Carroll (Johns Hopkins University) and Matthew D. Shapiro (University of Michigan), who are well-renowned for their work which establishes the importance of agent heterogeneity and microeconomic behavior for macroeconomic outcomes. The event brought together researchers from both the academia and policymaking institutions, who presented their thought-provoking research which both empirically documented the importance of agent heterogeneity, and attempted to theoretically model its aggregate implications in the corporate, housing, banking sectors and labor markets. This article provides a summary of some of the lessons from the workshop, focusing in particular on reviewing the contributions by the keynote speakers and the papers presented at the workshop.