Microeconomic uncertainty and macroeconomic indeterminacy

Macroeconomic Evidence and Microeconomic Foundations

Macroeconomic forecasts and microeconomic forecasters

In the presence of principal-agent problems, published macroeconomic forecasts by professional economists may not measure expectations. Forecasters may use their forecasts in order to manipulate beliefs about their ability. I test a cross-sectional implication of models of reputation and information-revelation. I find that as forecasters become older and more established, they produce more radi...

Price Rigidity: Microeconomic Evidence and Macroeconomic Implications

We review recent evidence on price rigidity from themacroeconomics literature and discuss how this evidence is used to inform macroeconomic modeling. Sluggish price adjustment is a leading explanation for the large effects of demand shocks on output and, in particular, the effects of monetary policy on output. A recent influx of data on individual prices has greatly deepenedmacroeconomists’ und...

Microeconomic Origins of Macroeconomic Tail Risks

We document that even though the normal distribution is a good approximation to the nature of aggregate fluctuations, it severely underpredicts the frequency of large economic downturns. We then provide a model that can explain these facts simultaneously. Our model shows that the propagation of microeconomic shocks through input-output linkages can fundamentally reshape the distribution of aggr...

Quitting and Labor Turnover: Microeconomic Evidence and Macroeconomic Consequences*

This paper presents an integrated approach to wage and employment determination combining microeconomic evidence with macroeconomic theory. More specifically, we first develop an efficiency wage model with labor turnover and show that the worker’s decision problem gives rise to a quit-rate function. We then use microeconomic data to estimate this quit-rate function and to test the specification...