November 19, 2015
D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
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Heterogeneity in the Dynamic Effects of Uncertainty on Investment
How does aggregate profit uncertainty influence investment activity at the firm level? We propose a parsimonious adaptation of a factor-autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to exploit information in a subindustry sales panel for an efficient and tractable estimation of aggregate volatility. -
Risk Sharing in the Presence of a Public Good
This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents’ relative preference for private versus public good consumption. -
Managerial Compensation Duration and Stock Price Manipulation
I build a model of optimal managerial compensation where managers each have a privately observed propensity to manipulate short-term stock prices. -
A Wake-Up-Call Theory of Contagion
We propose a novel theory of financial contagion. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions with an initially uncertain correlation of regional fundamentals. -
Information, Risk Sharing and Incentives in Agency Problems
This paper studies the use of information for incentives and risk sharing in agency problems. When the principal is risk neutral or the outcome is contractible, risk sharing is unnecessary or completely taken care of by a contract on the outcome. -
International Spillovers of Policy Uncertainty
Using the Baker et al. (2013) index of policy uncertainty for six developed countries, this paper estimates spillovers of policy uncertainty. We find that spillovers account for slightly more than one-fourth of the dynamics of policy uncertainty in these countries, with this share rising to one-half during the financial crisis. -
Information, Amplification and Financial Crisis
We propose a parsimonious model of information choice in a global coordination game of regime change that is used to analyze debt crises, bank runs or currency attacks. A change in the publicly available information alters the uncertainty about the behavior of other investors. -
Consumer Attitudes and the Epidemiology of Inflation Expectations
This paper studies the formation of consumers’ inflation expectations using micro-level data from the Michigan Survey. It shows that beyond the well-established socio-economic determinants of inflation expectations such as gender, income or education, other characteristics such as the households’ financial situation and their purchasing attitudes also matter. -
Filling in the Blanks: Network Structure and Interbank Contagion
The network pattern of financial linkages is important in many areas of banking and finance. Yet bilateral linkages are often unobserved, and maximum entropy serves as the leading method for estimating counterparty exposures.