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Report
Coarse Pricing Policies
The puzzling behavior of inflation in the Great Recession and its aftermath has increased the need to better understand the constraints that firms face when setting prices. Using new data and theory, I demonstrate that each firm's choice of how much information to acquire to set prices determines aggregate price dynamics through the patterns of pricing at the micro level, and through the large heterogeneity in pricing policies across firms. Viewed through this lens, the behavior of prices in recent years becomes less puzzling, as firms endogenously adjust their information acquisition ...
Report
Subsidizing Startups under Imperfect Information
We study the early stages of firm creation under imperfect information. Because startups make error-prone decisions due to rational inattention, the model generates both inefficient entry and labor misallocation. We show that information frictions alter the effects of lump-sum transfers to startups: the total employment gain is amplified due to an unintended increase in inefficient entry, most entrants hire fewer workers, and misallocation goes up. The transfer makes low-size, previously dominated actions profitable, affecting the entire endogenous learning problem and making even productive ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Asymmetric firm dynamics under rational inattention
We study the link between business failures, markups and business cycle asymmetry in the U.S. economy with a model of optimal firm exit under rational inattention. We show that the model's predictions of lagged, counter-cyclical and positively skewed markups together with counter-cyclical exit rates are consistent with the empirical evidence. Moreover, our model uncovers a new mechanism that links information processing with the business cycle. It predicts counter-cyclical attention to economic conditions consistent with survey evidence.
Report
Information acquisition and financial intermediation
Informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two in an intermediated market. Although households can acquire additional signals to reduce the informational asymmetry, the additional information is costly, making it rational for households to limit the accuracy of the signals they observe. I show that this leads the equity capital constraint to bind more frequently, making the asset prices in the economy more volatile unconditionally. When disagreement between households and specialists is high, however, return volatility decreases. I find ...
Working Paper
No Firm Is an Island? How Industry Conditions Shape Firms’ Expectations
We study how firms’ expectations and actions are affected by both aggregate and industry-specific conditions using a survey of French manufacturing firms. We document an important new stylized fact. In response to industry-level shocks that have no aggregate effects, firms’ aggregate expectations respond persistently. This is consistent with “island” models in which firms use the local prices they observe to make inferences about broader aggregate conditions. We then assess the extent to which these patterns are related to observable characteristics of firms and the industries in ...
Report
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
Geometric Methods for Finite Rational Inattention
We present a geometric approach to the finite Rational Inattention (RI) model, recasting it as a convex optimization problem with reduced dimensionality that is well-suited to numerical methods. We provide an algorithm that outperforms existing RI computation techniques in terms of both speed and accuracy. We also introduce methods to quantify the impact of numerical inaccuracy on the behavioral predictions and to produce robust predictions regarding the most frequently implemented actions.
Working Paper
Portfolio choice with house value misperception
Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on average, in a 4.56 percent decrease in the share of risky stock holdings for those households that participate in the stock market. We then build a rational inattention model in which households make decisions based on their perceived level of housing wealth. Numerical simulations generate the effects of ...
Working Paper
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
I show that economic agents’ attention to macroeconomic events can increase macroeconomic uncertainty during recessions. Agents face uncertainty about the aggregate state of the economy, receive dispersed information about it, and can pay attention to acquire more information. When the economy is in a bad state, agents choose to pay more attention, and their collective response increases three common measures of uncertainty: (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) forecast dispersion about output, and (iii) subjective uncertainty about output. Uncertainty driven by agents’ attention implies ...