The Great Recession was a deep downturn with long-lasting e ects on credit markets, labor markets and output. While narratives about what caused the recession abound, the persistence of GDP below its pre-crisis trend is puzzling. We propose a simple persistence mechanism that can be easily quanti ed and combined with existing models, even complex ones. Our solution rests on the premise that no ...

We report on experiments examining the value of commitment in Stackelberg games where the follower chooses whether to pay some cost to perfectly observe the leader’s action. Várdy [Games Econ. Behav. (2004)] shows that in the unique pure-strategy subgame perfect equilibrium of this game, the value of commitment is lost completely; however, there exists a mixed-strategy subgame perfect equilibri...

Dynamic partial adjustment models of residential electricity demand account for the fact that households may not adjust electricity consumption immediately in response to changes in prices, income, and other relevant factors, because of behavioral habits or adjustment costs for the capital stock of appliances. However, forward-looking behavior is generally neglected. Expectations about future p...

Discretionary Latitude and Relational Contracting We use economic experiments to examine the nature of relational trading under a menu of incomplete contracts ranging from the repeat purchase mechanism of Klein and Leffler (1981) to highly incomplete contracts that are completely unenforceable by third-parties. Our results suggest that, with barriers to complete contracting, increasing the degr...

In this paper we report the results of a laboratory experiment, in which we observed the behavior of agents in a simple macroeconomic setting. The structure of the economy was only partially known to the players which is a realistic feature of our experiment. We investigate whether subjects manage to approach optimal behavior even if they lack important information. Furthermore, we analyze subj...

Most DSGE models assume full information and model-consistent expectations. This paper relaxes both these assumptions in the context of the stochastic growth model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents. Households do not have direct knowledge of the structure of economy or the values of aggregate quantities; instead they form expectations by learning from the prices in their marketco...

We study a matched sample of individual stock market forecasts consisting of both qualitative and quantitative forecasts. This allows us to test for the quality of forecast quantification methods by comparing quantified qualitative forecasts with actual quantitative forecasts. Focusing mainly on the widely used quantification framework advocated by Carlson and Parkin (1975), the so-called “prob...

We present a decision theoretic framework in which agents are learning about market behavior and that provides microfoundations for models of adaptive learning. Agents are ‘internally rational’, i.e., maximize discounted expected utility under uncertainty given consistent subjective beliefs about the future, but agents may not be ‘externally rational’, i.e., may not know the true stochastic pro...

Psychological and Biological Foundations of Time Preference: Evidence from a Day Reconstruction Study with Biological Tracking This paper considers the relationship between the economic concept of time preference and relevant concepts from psychology and biology. Using novel data from a time diary study conducted in Ireland that combined detailed psychometric testing with medical testing and re...