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Researchers in economic policy-making institutions have invested much energy in developing a new generation of macroeconomic models that rely on more solid microeconomic foundations.This article briefly describes applications of two such models. The Global Economy Model (GEM) is a quarterly model comprising a large set of nominal and real rigidities that enable users to generate realistic short-term dynamics. As the model rests on the representative-agent paradigm, its main weakness is that its fundamental theoretical structure does not provide a very realistic characterization of tax-policy effects. By contrast, the Global Fiscal Model (GFM) – an annual model – uses a nested-generation framework, and has been explicitly designed to study the longer-term consequences of alternative tax policies.