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Working Paper
Learning and the Value of Trade Relationships
This paper quantifies the value of importer-exporter relationships. We show that almost 80 percent of U.S. imports take place in pre-existing relationships, with sizable heterogeneity across countries, and show that traded quantities and survival increase as relationships age. We develop a two-country general equilibrium trade model with learning that is consistent with these facts. A model-based measure of relationship value explains survival during the 2008-09 crisis. Knowledge accumulated within long-term relationships is quantitatively important: wiping out all memory from previous ...
Working Paper
Asset Price Learning and Optimal Monetary Policy
We characterize optimal monetary policy when agents are learning about endogenous asset prices. Boundedly rational expectations induce inefficient equilibrium asset price fluctuations which translate into inefficient aggregate demand fluctuations. We find that the optimal policy raises interest rates when expected capital gains, and the level of current asset prices, is high. The optimal policy does not eliminate deviations of asset prices from their fundamental value. When monetary policymakers are information-constrained, optimal policy can be reasonably approximated by simple interest rate ...
Working Paper
Is the Intrinsic Value of Macroeconomic News Announcements Related to their Asset Price Impact?
The literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. We explain this variation with a novel measure of the intrinsic value of an announcement - the announcement's ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation, and the Federal Funds Target Rate-and decompose it into the announcement's relation to fundamentals, a timeliness premium, and a revision premium. We find that differences in intrinsic value can explain a significant fraction of the variation in the announcements' price impact on Treasury bond yields. The announcements' timeliness and relation to ...
Working Paper
The Natural Rate of Interest Through a Hall of Mirrors
Prevailing explanations of persistently low interest rates appeal to a secular decline in the natural interest rate, or r-star, due to factors outside monetary policy's control. We propose informational feedback via learning as an alternative explanation for persistently low rates, where monetary policy plays a crucial role. We extend the canonical New Keynesian model to an incomplete information setting where the central bank and the private sector learn about r-star and infer each other's information from observed macroeconomic outcomes. An informational feedback loop emerges when each side ...
Report
Central bank transparency and nonlinear learning dynamics
Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants' expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents' learning and the dynamics of the economy are heavily affected by central bank transparency about its policy rule. A central bank that does not communicate its rule can induce "learning equilibria" in which the economy alternates between periods of deflation coupled with low output and periods of high economic activity with excessive ...
Working Paper
Stock Market Volatility and Learning
Consumption-based asset pricing models with time-separable preferences can generate realistic amounts of stock price volatility if one allows for small deviations from rational expectations. We consider rational investors who entertain subjective prior beliefs about price behavior that are not equal but close to rational expectations. Optimal behavior then dictates that investors learn about price behavior from past price observations. We show that this imparts momentum and mean reversion into the equilibrium behavior of the price-dividend ratio, similar to what can be observed in the data. ...
Working Paper
Market-making with Search and Information Frictions
We develop a dynamic model of trading through market-makers that incorporates two canonical sources of illiquidity: trading (or search) frictions, which imply that market-makers have some amount of market power; and information frictions, which imply that market-makers face some degree of adverse selection. We use this model to study the effects of various technological innovations and regulatory initiatives that have reduced trading frictions in over-the-counter markets. Our main result is that reducing trading frictions can lead to less liquidity, as measured by bid-ask spreads. The key ...
Journal Article
Responding to Pandemic Learning Loss
The end of this school year marks just over two years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that time, students and educators across the country have had to adapt continually to new styles of learning and education delivery. Many students have found success in virtual and hybrid environments, while others have had a more difficult time. This has led to a loss in learning compared to where students would normally have been based on their age and development stage. This loss has the potential to set back these students for years to come, affecting not only their development, but also the ...
Working Paper
Avoiding Nash Inflation : Bayesian and Robust Responses to Model Uncertainty
We examine learning, model misspecification, and robust policy responses to misspecification in a quasi-real-time environment. The laboratory for the analysis is the Sargent (1999) explanation for the origins of inflation in the 1970s and the subsequent disinflation. Three robust policy rules are derived that differ according to the extent that misspecification is taken as a parametric phenomenon. These responses to drifting estimated parameters and apparent misspecification are compared to the certainty-equivalent case studied by Sargent. We find gains from utilizing robust approaches to ...
Report
The science of monetary policy: an imperfect knowledge perspective
New Keynesian theory identifies a set of principles central to the design and implementation of monetary policy. These principles rely on the ability of a central bank to manage expectations precisely, with policy prescriptions typically derived under the assumption of perfect information and full rationality. However, the challenging macroeconomic environment bequeathed by the financial crisis has led many to question the efficacy of monetary policy, and, particularly, to question whether central banks can influence expectations with as much control as previously thought. In this paper, we ...