Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

Janice Eberly

The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) is a journal of macroeconomics published twice a year by the Brookings Institution Press. BPEA commenced publication in 1970 under the editorship of Arthur Okun and George Perry, and since then has been ranked as a leading journal in the field. The journal was edited by David Romer and Justin Wolfers from 2009 through 2015.Janice Eberly and assumed the editorship in 2016.

Each issue of the journal comprises the proceedings of a conference held in at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. each spring and fall. The conference and journal both focus on the empirical analysis of issues of current relevance to macroeconomic policy with particular attention given to "recent and current economic developments that are directly relevant to the contemporary scene or especially challenging because they stretch our understanding of economic theory or previous empirical findings". Each issue typically publishes six full-length papers, along with two comments on each paper and a summary of the general discussion from the conference.

Sixteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics have contributed as authors or discussants for BPEA since its inception in 1970, including: Robert J. Shiller, Thomas J. Sargent, Christopher A. Sims, Peter A. Diamond, Oliver E. Williamson, Paul Krugman, Edmund S. Phelps, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Daniel McFadden, Gary S. Becker, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, George Stigler, James Tobin, and Lawrence Klein.