Expectations Matter: The New Causal Macroeconomics of Surveys and Experiments
By: Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko – University of Texas at Austin, University of California, Berkeley
How do expectations about the future influence economic behavior? For decades, economists have known that beliefs play a central role—from how much households spend, to how firms set prices, to how central banks design policy. But figuring out exactly how expectations affect decisions has been one of the field’s most persistent empirical challenges.
In this book, Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko present a fresh empirical approach: using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to study the causal impact of expectations. Drawing on more than a decade of their research, they show how targeted information treatments can generate experimental variation in beliefs—making it possible to measure how those beliefs influence real-world decisions. Along the way, they reassess the limits of the traditional rational expectations framework and offer a richer, evidence-based picture of how people form and act on their views about the economy.
Blending the credibility of field experiments with the big-picture questions of macroeconomics, the authors provide a clear, practical guide to this new methodology—from survey design to implementation to measuring how beliefs pass through into behavior.
The Future of Work in Developing Countries
Edited by: Arjun Jayadev, Akbar Noman, Joseph E. Stiglitz – Azim Premji University, Bangalore, Columbia University
One of the most pressing issues in development today is the employment challenge in low- and middle-income countries. As more young people enter the labor force—and as structural transformation unfolds amid deindustrialization, technological disruption, and global competition—the question of how to create sufficient decent jobs has become central to the economic future of the Global South. Although this is a shared challenge across developing regions, it is particularly acute in Africa, where rapid demographic change and urbanization are colliding with limited industrial expansion.
Bringing together leading international scholars, The Future of Work in Developing Countries examines the employment problem from multiple perspectives. Early chapters develop conceptual frameworks around corporations and the global hierarchy of production. Subsequent contributions investigate the dynamics of structural transformation, the role of firms in linking production and labor to surplus, and the design of industrial and technology policies. Later chapters turn to detailed case studies—especially from Africa—that illustrate the possibilities and limits of different growth paths, and comparative insights from Asia and Latin America provide further perspective.
By combining rigorous theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book demonstrates that employment creation is not an automatic byproduct of growth but a political and institutional project. It offers fresh insights for scholars of development, political economy, and economic history, as well as for policy makers seeking strategies to promote inclusive transformation in Africa and beyond.
Disposable Workers – The Transformation of Employment
By: Paul Osterman – MIT
Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and protections that have traditionally come with employee status, businesses are turning to tactics that let them treat people as interchangeable parts, to be used and discarded as needed. Drawing on an original survey of over 6,000 workers, Disposable Workers reveals the striking extent of this transformation across the occupational hierarchy, affecting everyone from janitors to nurses.
Paul Osterman identifies three distinct categories of disposable workers: contractors, freelancers, and marginal employees. The marginal category, unique to Osterman’s analysis, describes workers who are employees from a narrow legal standpoint but are held at arm’s length by their firm—left without job security, skill training, or opportunities for promotion. Many low-wage service workers toil in marginal jobs, but so do white-collar professionals such as adjunct university faculty and staff attorneys at law firms. When the three categories are added up, they account for more than 35 percent of the American workforce.
Not all disposable workers object to their arrangements. But most contractors and marginal employees would prefer standard employment, and there is a significant cost to their current status. In response, Disposable Workers offers a range of policy recommendations, including mechanisms to prevent over-reliance on contracting and freelancing as well as reforms to improve job quality for part-timers and marginal employees. As the deconstruction of employment affects more and more workers, the importance of such measures will only grow.
Steering Structural Change – Rethinking Government Policy to Support Fundamental Economic Transformations
Edited by: Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Maurice Obstfeld, Petia Topalova – IMF, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Steering Structural Change explores looming transformations that both advanced and developing economies face as rising geopolitical tensions, accelerating climate change, and advances in technology disrupt economic structures. These seismic factors demand a fundamental reconsideration of economic policies.
Even though there is a general understanding of the policy measures and reforms needed at this juncture, the unequal economic effects and political economy obstacles that they entail can impede their implementation. Technological advances, such as digitalization, automation, and AI, will disrupt labor markets as productivity improvements enhance some occupations but obviate others. The clear aggregate benefits of technological progress will come with large and long-lasting adjustment costs. Uniquely captured in this edited collection, the current debate among experts and economists will help guide the design of effective policies to prepare workers, ease the process of reallocation, and ensure that the collective benefits are broadly shared.
