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Rational inattention in hiring decisions
We provide an information-based theory of matching efficiency fluctuations. Rationally inattentive firms have limited capacity to process information and cannot perfectly identify suitable applicants. During recessions, higher losses from hiring unsuitable workers cause firms to be more selective in hiring. When firms cannot obtain sufficient information about applicants, they err on the side of caution and accept fewer applicants to minimize losses from hiring unsuitable workers. Pro-cyclical acceptance rates drive a wedge between meeting and hiring rates, explaining fluctuations in matching ...
Working Paper
Rationally Inattentive Savers and Monetary Policy Changes: A Laboratory Experiment
We present a model where rationally inattentive agents decide how much to save while imperfectly tracking interest rate changes. Suitable assumptions on agents’ preferences and interest rate distribution allow us to derive testable theoretical predictions and their implications for monetary policy. We probe these predictions using a laboratory experiment with induced inattention that closely reflects the theoretical assumptions. We find that, empirically, the laboratory data corroborates the results of the theoretical model. In particular, we show that experimental subjects respond to ...
Working Paper
Supply Chain Networks and the Macroeconomic Expectations of Firms
In a randomized control trial of customer-supplier firm pairs in New Zealand, we treat with information one firm in a pair and analyze the treatment's effects on the expectations and actions of both the directly treated firms (direct effect) and connected firms that did not directly receive information (spillover effect). The direct and spillover effects on expectations and actions are significant and of comparable magnitude. Higher expected future real GDP growth increases prices and employment, while greater uncertainty about it reduces prices, investment, and employment. We show that ...
Working Paper
Attention and a Paradox of Uncertainty
I show that macroeconomic uncertainty during recessions can arise from people paying more attention to aggregate events. When information is dispersed, people's attempts to acquire more information can lead to higher aggregate volatility, forecast dispersion, and uncertainty about aggregate output. Information rigidity is reduced, consistent with evidence in forecast surveys, and distinct from the prediction of exogenous volatility shocks. When the model is calibrated to U.S. data, endogenous attention accounts for half of the observed fluctuations in volatility, forecast dispersion, and ...
Working Paper
Sovereign Debt Restructuring and Credit Recovery
This paper focuses on the significant growth of domestic credit once the debt is restructured and shows that is not correlated with the size of the haircut. Second, it performs an event study around Ecuador’s sovereign default and restructuring of 2008-2009 to study changes in domestic bank lending behavior. After external debt restructuring, private lending increased the most for banks highly exposed to public debt. Finally, it provides a simple model were uncertainty about the return on government external debt during default has spillover effects on the domestic economy by creating ...
Working Paper
Overconfidence, Subjective Perception, and Pricing Behavior
We study the implications of overconfidence for price setting in a monopolistic competition setup with incomplete information. Our price-setters overestimate their abilities to infer aggregate shocks from private signals. The fraction of uninformed firms is endogenous; firms can obtain information by paying a fixed cost. We find two results: (1) overconfident firms are less inclined to acquire information, and (2) prices might exhibit excess volatility driven by nonfundamental noise. We explore the empirical predictions of our model for idiosyncratic price volatility.
Working Paper
The Effect of Safe Assets on Financial Fragility in a Bank-Run Model
Risk-averse investors induce competitive intermediaries to hold safe assets, thereby lowering the probability of a run and reducing financial fragility. We revisit Goldstein and Pauzner (2005), who obtain a unique equilibrium in the banking model of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) by introducing risky investment and noisy private signals. We show that, in the optimal demand-deposit contract subject to sequential service, banks hold safe assets to insure investors against investment risk. Consequently, fewer investors withdraw prematurely, which reduces the probability of a bank run. Safe asset ...
Report
Can subjective expectations data be used in choice models? Evidence on cognitive biases
A pervasive concern with the use of subjective data in choice models is that the data are biased and endogenous. This paper examines the extent to which cognitive biases plague subjective data, specifically addressing 1) whether cognitive dissonance affects the reporting of beliefs, and 2) whether individuals exert sufficient mental effort when probed about their subjective beliefs. For this purpose, I collect a unique panel data set of Northwestern University undergraduates that contains their subjective expectations about outcomes specific to different majors in their choice set. I do not ...
Working Paper
Banking on Experience. Capital Reallocation, Asset Knowledge, and the Structure of Credit Contracts
The firm sector continuously engages in the reallocation of physical capital. We study the implications for credit market outcomes of banks' engagement in borrowing firms' capital reallocation. We develop a model in which banks' experience with the reallocation opportunities of physical capital raises their ability to recover liquidation values after firm defaults and asset reallocations, diluting banks' incentives to monitor borrowers. To test the model, we then construct an empirical measure of banks' engagement in capital reallocation using US loan-level data matched with firm-level data ...
Working Paper
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
This paper studies a dispersed information economy in which agents can exert costly attention to learn about an unknown aggregate state of the economy. Under certain conditions, attention and four measures of uncertainty are countercyclical: Agents pay more attention when they expect the economy to be in a bad state, and their reaction generates higher (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) cross-sectional output dispersion, (iii) forecast dispersion about aggregate output, and (iv) subjective uncertainty about aggregate output faced by each agent. All these phenomena are prominent features of ...