Download or read book Essay on Beliefs and the Macroeconomy written by Pooya Molavi and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three essays. The first essay explores a form of bounded rationality where agents learn about the economy with possibly misspecified models. I consider a recursive general-equilibrium framework that nests a large class of macroeconomic models. Misspecification is represented as a constraint on the set of beliefs agents can entertain. I introduce the solution concept of constrained-rational-expectations equilibrium (CREE), in which each agent selects the belief from her constrained set that is closest to the endogenous distribution of observables in the Kullback-Leibler divergence. If the set of permissible beliefs contains the rational-expectations equilibria (REE), then the REE are CREE; otherwise, they are not. I show that a CREE exists, that it arises naturally as the limit of adaptive and Bayesian learning, and that it incorporates a version of the Lucas critique. I then apply CREE to a particular novel form of bounded rationality where beliefs are constrained to factor models with a small number of endogenously chosen factors. Misspecification leads to amplification or dampening of shocks and history dependence. The calibrated economy exhibits hump-shaped impulse responses and co-movements in consumption, output, hours, and investment that resemble business-cycle fluctuations. In the second essay, I ask the following question: What are the testable restrictions imposed on the dynamics of an agent's belief by the hypothesis of Bayesian rationality, which do not rely on the additional assumption that the agent has an objectively correct prior? In this paper, I argue that there are essentially no such restrictions. I consider an agent who chooses a sequence of actions and an econometrician who observes the agent's actions and is interested in testing the hypothesis that the agent is Bayesian. I argue that--absent a priori knowledge on the part of the econometrician on the set of models considered by the agent--there are almost no observations that would lead the econometrician to conclude that the agent is not Bayesian. This result holds even if the set of actions is sufficiently rich that the agent's action fully reveals her belief about the payoff-relevant state and even if the econometrician observes a large number of identical agents facing the same sequence of decision problems. In the third essay, I propose an equilibrium search and matching model with permanent worker heterogeneity, asymmetric information, and endogenous separations and study the dynamics of adverse selection in the labor market. The interaction between asymmetric information and endogenous separations leads to a cyclical adverse selection problem that has testable predictions both for the aggregate variables and for individual workers' outcomes. First, a deterioration in the distribution of ability in the pool of the unemployed leads firms to raise their hiring standards, thus resulting in shifting out of the Beveridge curve. Second, if the separation rate is log-supermodular (log-submodular) in productivity and ability, the pool of the unemployed becomes more (less) adversely selected in downturns. Third, firms rationally discriminate against the long-term unemployed by demanding more unequivocally positive signals of their ability before hiring them. Fourth, this scarring effect is more (less) severe for lower-ability workers and after deeper recessions if the separation rate is log-supermodular (log-submodular). I conclude by providing conditions on the fundamentals of the economy that lead to log-supermodular and log-submodular separation rates.

Download or read book A Critical Essay on Modern Macroeconomic Theory written by Frank Hahn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1980s, rational expectations and new classical economics dominated macroeconomic theory. This essay evolved from theauthors' profound disagreement with that trend. It demonstrates notonly how the new classical view got macroeconomics wrong, but also howto go about doing macroeconomics the right way.

Download or read book Essays on Economics of Beliefs written by Mikhail Galashin and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the effects and elicitation of beliefs. In the first chapter we estimate the effects of macroeconomic expectations on consumer decisions. We examine this question using an experiment with 2,872 credit card customers at a large commercial bank. We provide participants with expert forecasts of inflation and the nominal exchange rate and measure the consumption response to this information using detailed data on individual credit card transactions. We find that forecasts strongly affect inflation and exchange rate expectations, but do not change spending or self-reported consumption plans as predicted by standard models of intertemporal choice. Results from a supplementary survey experiment suggest that consumers are sophisticated enough to anticipate nominal rigidities that lower expected real income and reduce spending on durables for precautionary reasons, counteracting the effects predicted by standard models of intertemporal optimization. The absence of a link between consumer expectations and behavior has potentially important implications for macroeconomic policies such as forward guidance. The counter-intuitive results motivate development of more flexible method of belief elicitation, which could facilitate understanding of the subjects' decision making. While the elicitation of numerical variables, such as inflation, is well understood, certain beliefs, such as action plans during an inflation hike, cannot be represented numerically and require verbal elicitation. Verbal elicitation forces the researcher either to use open-ended questions or know the most important answers in advance. We propose a method to crowdsource potential answers to open-ended questions. This ensures that the survey is adaptive and does not miss important answers while maintaining a low-cost, multiple-choice format. We propose two measures of information loss to evaluate the quality of multiple-choice questions: the semantic similarity of selected answers to the open-ended answers to the same question and the probability of selecting any answer from the list. We conduct an experiment to examine the impact of monetary incentives and characteristics of respondents on the quality of crowdsourced answers. Our findings show that incentives can increase quality and effort, but the effects are relatively small compared to the variation across respondents. We find that option authors' similarity to the respondents in beliefs, political views, and demographics, explains a large fraction of the variation in quality. These results imply that sample selection is likely to be more important for crowdsourcing hypotheses than incentive design. The third chapter charts a research agenda extending the work on the verbal elicitation techniques. In particular, we focus on the potential of large language models (LLMs) to improve belief elicitation techniques with natural language. We review the current state of belief elicitation in economics. Next, we introduce the main architectures and relevant fine-tuning techniques for LLMs. Lastly, we discuss the potential applications of LLMs to belief elicitation and the use of beliefs in empirical work. This includes using LLMs for representing beliefs numerically, interacting with subjects during belief elicitation, and generating hypotheses regarding how beliefs affect actions.

Download or read book Essays on Belief Updating Forecasting and Robust Policy Making Based on Macroeconomic Variables written by Yizhou Kuang and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that delve into the intersection of econometrics and macroeconomics. The essays employ econometric tools to investigate various topics related to macroeconomic forecasting and policy-making. The first essay aims to help policy-makers conduct robust inference on parameters that may suffer identification issues from DSGE models, and perform reliable counterfactual analysis based on available macroeconomic indicators. The second essay from a non-structural perspective, explores how to optimally forecast these variables in real-time utilizing available macroeconomic variables under model uncertainty. The last essay looks at Survey of Professional Forecasters and studies how agents update their beliefs based on common and private signals during business cycles.The first chapter introduces a new algorithm to conduct robust Bayesian estimation and inference in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The algorithm combines standard Bayesian methods with an equivalence characterization of model solutions. This algorithm allows researchers to perform the following analysis: First, find the complete range of posterior means of both the deep parameters and any parameters of interest robust to the choice of priors in a sense I make precise. Second, derive the robust Bayesian credible region for these parameters. I prove the validity of this algorithm and apply this method to the models in Cochrane (2011) and An and Schorfheide (2007) to achieve robust estimations for structural parameters and impulse responses. In addition, I conduct a sensitivity analysis of optimal monetary policy rules with respect to the choice of priors and provide bounds to the optimal Taylor rule parameters.In the second chapter, my coauthors Yongmiao Hong, Yuying Sun and I focus on real-time monitoring of economic activities, also known as nowcasting. Nowcasting can be particularly challenging in the era of Big Data because it requires the management of a substantial amount of time series data that exhibit different frequencies and release dates. In this paper, we propose a novel now-casting strategy that utilizes dynamic factor models, which we call leave-b-out forward validation model averaging with penalization (LboFVMA). We demonstrate that the selected weight converges asymptotically to an optimal and consistent estimator, even in cases where all candidate models are misspecified. Further-more, the proposed estimator is consistent and follows an asymptotic Gaussian distribution if the true model is included among the candidate models. Our simulation results demonstrate that the LboFVMA approach performs well, as it generates low mean square forecast errors. This highlights its effectiveness and accuracy in the field of nowcasting.In the third chapter, my coauthors Nathan Mislang, Kristoffer Nimark and I propose a method to empirically decompose a cross-section of observed belief revisions into components driven by private and common signals under weak assumptions. We define a common signal as the single signal that if observed by all agents can explain the maximum amount of belief revisions across agents. Private signals are defined to explain the residual belief revisions unaccounted for by the common signal. When applied to probability forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters we find that private signals account for more of the observed belief revisions than common signals. There is a large cross-sectional heterogeneity in signal precision across forecasters, with about 1/2 of them observing private signals that are less precise than the common signal. Unconditionally, the precision of private and common signals are positively correlated, suggesting that private and common information are complements. Inflation volatility, perceived stock market volatility and a high risk of recession are all factors associated with increased informativeness and precision of both private and common signals. Disagreement between the private and common signals can partly explain increases in uncertainty about macro variables. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical models of information acquisition.

Download or read book Essays on the Role of Belief Formation for Asset Prices and the Macroeconomy written by Alessandro Graniero and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Economic Theory Growth and Labour Markets written by George Bitros and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinguished contributors in this volume provide a variety of essays, which are written in honor of Emmanuel Drandakis. These essays fall into four uniform areas of economics: economic growth, general equilibrium, labor economics and game theory and applications. The editors focus on a select set of issues that stand high on the agenda of academic research. They provide fresh insights and approaches to the analysis of these issues, and thus open up wider avenues for our understanding of the dilemmas posed for theory and policy. Readers are offered new empirical evidence on such thorny social problems as, for example, unemployment, the intergenerational transmission of human capital and the response of wages to price and endowment changes.

Download or read book Three Essay on Heterogenous Beliefs in Costly State Verification Models written by Ludovic Renou and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Are Economists Basically Immoral written by Paul T. Heyne and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Art Economists Basically Immoral?" and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion is a collection of Heyne's essays focused on an issue that preoccupied him throughout his life and which concerns many free-market skeptics - namely, how to reconcile the apparent selfishness of a free-market economy with ethical behavior." "Written with the nonexpert in mind, and in a highly engaging style, these essays will interest students of economics, professional economists with an interest in ethical and theological topics, and Christians who seek to explore economic issues."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Essays in Economic Theory Growth and Labour Markets written by Emmanuel Drandakis and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the contributors are from Athens University, Greece, where economist Drandakis taught for four decades before his recent retirement. Focusing on his primary interests of economic growth, general equilibrium, labor economics, and game theory and its applications, the 14 essays consider such topics as discounting and the growth of net national product, beliefs and the neutrality of money, the incidence of increased unemployment in the Group of Seven from 1970 to 1974, labor incentives and manumission in ancient Greek slavery, and the economics of research joint ventures. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Words Objects and Events in Economics written by Peter Róna and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book examines from a variety of perspectives the disappearance of moral content and ethical judgment from the models employed in the formulation of modern economic theory, and some of the papers contain important proposals about how moral judgment could be reintroduced in economic theory. The chapters collected in this volume result from the favorable reception of the first volume of the Virtues in Economics series and represent further contributions to the themes set out in that volume: (i) examining the philosophical and methodological fallacies of this turn in modern economic theory that the removal of the moral motivation of economic agents from modern economic theory has entailed; and (ii) proposing a return descriptive economics as the means with which the moral content of economic life could be restored in economic theory. This book is of interest to researchers and students of the methodology of economics, ethics, philosophers concerned with agency and economists who build economic models that rest in the intention of the agent.

Download or read book Essays on Imperfect Information Macroeconomic Fluctuations and Nominal Rigidities written by Jean-Paul L'Huillier and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information; these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual changes in fundamentals (news) from those due to temporary errors in the private sector's estimates of these fundamentals (noise). Using a simple model where the consumption random walk hypothesis holds exactly, we address some basic methodological issues and take a first pass at the data. First, we show that if the econometrician has no informational advantage over the agents in the model, structural VARs cannot be used to identify news and noise shocks. Next, we develop a structural Maximum Likelihood approach which allows us to identify the model's parameters and to evaluate the role of news and noise shocks. Applied to postwar U.S. data, this approach suggests that noise shocks play an important role in short-run fluctuations. The second essay experimentally examines whether looking at other people's pricing decisions is a type of heuristic, a decision rule that people over-apply even when it is not applicable. such as in the case of clearly private value goods. We find evidence that this is indeed the case. individual valuation of a purely subjective experience under full information, elicited using incentive compatible mechanism, is highly influenced by values of others. As the third essay shows, this result can shed light on price rigidities. Inspired by the experimental results of the second essay, the third essay develops a model of slow macroeconomic adjustment to monetary shocks. The model exploits the idea that buyers are imperfectly informed about their nominal valuation. I proceed in three steps. First, I develop a mechanism for price rigidities. My mechanism captures the notion that firms are reluctant to increase prices after an increase in demand or costs because it creates a disproportionate adverse reaction among consumers. These reactions arise endogenously for purely informational reasons. The key assumption is that some consumers are better informed than others about monetary shocks. If few consumers are informed, equilibria with nominal rigidity exist. In these equilibria firms do not change prices even though they are arbitrarily well informed, and have no menu costs. Moreover, if the proportion of informed consumers is low enough, these equilibria dominate equilibria with flexible prices. Second, I show that when firms do not change prices they inflict an informational externality on other firms. Consumers buy goods sequentially, one after the other, and change their beliefs about shocks when they see prices change. Therefore, when firms do not change prices, consumers do not learn. This hurts both firms and consumers. Third, I study the dynamic responses of output and inflation to shocks. Because of the informational externality learning is initially slow, the responses are delayed and hump-shaped. The responses are also asymmetric - prices increase faster than they decrease, and therefore negative shocks trigger larger output responses than positive shocks.

Download or read book The Economics of World War I written by Stephen Broadberry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-29 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique volume offers a definitive new history of European economies at war from 1914 to 1918. It studies how European economies mobilised for war, how existing economic institutions stood up under the strain, how economic development influenced outcomes and how wartime experience influenced post-war economic growth. Leading international experts provide the first systematic comparison of economies at war between 1914 and 1918 based on the best available data for Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the USA, Italy, Turkey, Austria-Hungary and the Netherlands. The editors' overview draws some stark lessons about the role of economic development, the importance of markets and the damage done by nationalism and protectionism. A companion volume to the acclaimed The Economics of World War II, this is a major contribution to our understanding of total war.

Download or read book Essays on the Great Depression written by Ben S. Bernanke and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a landmark book that provides vital lessons for understanding financial crises and their sometimes-catastrophic economic effects As chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis, Ben Bernanke helped avert a greater financial disaster than the Great Depression. And he did so by drawing directly on what he had learned from years of studying the causes of the economic catastrophe of the 1930s—work for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. Essays on the Great Depression brings together Bernanke’s influential work on the origins and economic lessons of the Depression, and this new edition also includes his Nobel Prize lecture.

Download or read book The Nature of Macroeconomics written by Athol Fitzgibbons and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nature of Macroeconomics is a short but adventurous book that punches well above its weight . . . As part of a growing literature that identifies methodological issues as central to any appreciation of macroeconomic debate, and which seeks to under-labor for a more relevant useful indeed, more scientific macroeconomics, Fitzgibbons book is to be warmly welcomed. Mark Setterfield, Review of Social Economy Fitzgibbons examines the foundations of macroeconomic theory and policy and develops an insightful discussion of important issues, especially the state of knowledge of both market participants and policymakers . . . The Nature of Macroeconomics is clearly a book that contributes to the growth of our own partial knowledge. David Dequech, Review of Political Economy Athol Fitzgibbons s book distils the main lesson of the debates on Keynes over the last 25 years: that macroeconomics has to be based on a theory of knowledge consistent with the way life is lived, where decisions are made in the face of imperfect knowledge. All existing theory (including, he argues, the General Theory) assumes either perfect knowledge or complete ignorance. He shows us why this has happened, and suggests a way out. It is a brave, knowledgeable and important book. Victoria Chick, University College London, UK A well-written, well-argued discussion of the foundations of macro. If you are unfamiliar with the arguments that macro is not, and cannot be, a traditional science, then this book is definitely worth reading. David Colander, Middlebury College, Vermont, US This book addresses the long absence of a satisfactory theory of macroeconomics. Keynesian theory is not consistent with rational self-interest, but neo-classical economics is unable to explain economic volatility and the trade cycle. Athol Fitzgibbons critiques the leading macroeconomic theories, which he believes are unduly mechanistic because they are incompatible with non-quantitative knowledge. The author sketches the intellectual history of partial knowledge and judgement so far as these relate to macroeconomics, and rejects the claims that Keynes recanted the analysis of practical reason in his Treatise on Probability. Fitzgibbons s theme is the possibility of a new synthesis of Keynes and the neoclassical system. This stresses financial rationality, but it also recognizes that there is an element of indeterminacy in both government policies and the movements of the market.

Download or read book The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money written by John Maynard Keynes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

Download or read book The Selected Essays of Meghanad Desai Macroeconomics and monetary theory written by Meghnad Desai and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meghnad Desai's work presents a significant challenge to economics as currently practised. This volume brings together a collection of essays on issues in macroeconomics and monetary theory from an unorthodox but rigorous position. Beginning with a series of essays which address the inflation problem using an extension of the Goodwin model, the volume continues with his revisionist interpretation of the Phillips Curve, assessments of monetarism, discussion of the economics of Keynes and Hayek, and an original paper on monetary theory. Later chapters include the author's work on applied econometrics, endogenous and exogenous money, and financial innovation. The volume also includes a substantial autobiographical preface, in which Lord Desai explains how he became an economist and the influences behind the development of his thought, as well as a specific introduction explaining how he came to produce the papers included in this volume.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Macroeconomic Methodology written by Jesper Jespersen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws together the various strands and schools of thought to provide a unique overview of the methods employed in the research and study of macroeconomics. Demonstrates the relevance and vitality of macroeconomics beyond the idea of microeconomic foundations.