This paper studies the dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under two alternative assumptions about information updating by households – rational inattention and sticky expectations. We first show that the two types of sticky information diffusion can help generate strong excess smoothness in durables consumption. We then find that sticky expectations due to a fixed cost does a better...

Using the standard real business cycle model with lump-sum taxes, we analyze the impact of fiscal policy when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations (RE). The output multipliers for government purchases are significantly higher under learning, and fall within empirical bounds reported in the literature (in sharp contrast to the implausibly low values ...

Using the standard real business cycle model with lump-sum taxes, we analyze the impact of fiscal policy when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations (RE). The output multipliers for government purchases are significantly higher under learning, and fall within empirical bounds reported in the literature (in sharp contrast to the implausibly low values ...

Recently, investment in high technology companies boomed as people invested large sums of money even when there was little chance of the company being profitable. This is contrary to classical beliefs that investors have rational expectations and maximise their utility. Instead we must consider the idea that people are irrational and make decisions for many reasons, few of which involve a judic...

Lotteries are introduced into Cavalcanti and Erosa (2008) [2], a version of Trejos and Wright (1995) [4] with aggregate shocks. Lotteries improve welfare and eliminate the two notable features of the optimum with deterministic trades: over-production and history-dependence. Moreover, the optimum can be supported by buyer take-it-or-leave-it offers. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL ...

We study the portfolio decision of a household with limited information-processing capacity in a setting with recursive utility. We find that rational inattention combined with a preference for early resolution of uncertainty leads to a significant drop in the share of portfolios held in risky assets, even when the departure from standard expected utility with rational expectations is small. In...

We add inside and outside money to the standard GEI model. If there enough gains to trade via money, then monetary equilibrium (ME) exists and money has positive value, even when GEI fails to exist. The nonexistence of GEI shows up as a liquidity trap in terms of the ME. In sharp contrast to GEI, the ME are generically determinate not only in terms of real, but also financial, variables. © 2003...

This paper studies the implications for business cycle dynamics of heterogeneous expectations in a stochastic growth model. The assumption of homogeneous, rational expectations is replaced with a heterogeneous expectations model where a fraction of agents hold rational expectations and the remaining fraction adopt parsimonious forecasting models that are, in equilibrium, optimal within a restri...

We consider mechanism design in contexts in which agents exhibit bounded depth of reasoning (level k) instead of rational expectations. We use simple direct mechanisms, in which agents report only first-order beliefs. While level 0 agents are assumed to be truth tellers, level k agents best-respond to their belief that other agents have at most k− 1 levels of reasoning. We find that incentive c...

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with multiple securities and heterogeneously informed agents. There are two types of multiplicity of equilibria, one due to noisy rational expectations and the other resulting from self-fulfilling prophecies. Under general conditions, there exists an equilibrium in which stock returns are highly volatile and strongly correlated, even if all un...