predicting early data revisions to u s gdp and the effects of releases on equity markets the effects of data uncertainty on real time decision making can be reduced by predicting data revisions to u s gdp growth we show that survey forecasts efficiently predict the revision implicit in the second estimate of gdp growth but that forecasting models incorporating monthly economic indicators and daily equity returns provide superior forecasts of the data revision implied by the release of the third estimate we use forecasting models to measure the impact of surprises in gdp announcements on equity markets and to analyze the effects of anticipated future revisions on announcement day returns we show that the publication of better than expected third release gdp figures provides a boost to equity markets and if future upward revisions are expected the effects are enhanced during recessions

real options analysis of investment in solar vs wind energy diversification strategies under uncertain prices and costs in this paper we study a community or firm considering to diversify its investment in two distinct renewable energy technologies namely wind and solar pv electricity we assume technological learning curves as a function of cumulative capital investment a real options approach is applied as it takes into account uncertainty about prices and learning as well as irreversibility associated with investment decisions we investigate three different cases dealing with uncertainty about future electricity prices and uncertainty about the speed with which learning drives the costs of wind and solar electricity down we assess the minimum threshold for the stochastic price and the maximum electricity production cost that makes it optimal for the firm to invest in the two technologies the results show that the learning rate affects the option to invest in but reducing critical threshold for exercising it the greater the amount of capital invested the more learning stimulates earlier exercising of the option to invest the firm will then anticipate the option to invest and exercise it for lower critical threshold values if all capital is invested in one technology if capital investment is diversified the option should be exercised at a higher critical threshold more uncertainty in energy prices or technology costs postpones the option to invest although investing in both solar and wind may be profitable under particular conditions of price and cost uncertainty the theoretically optimal strategy is generally investing in only one technology that is solar or wind depending on their relative initial costs and learning rates this suggests that the practice in most countries of diversifying renewable energy may reflect a mistaken strategy

imperfect information and the business cycle imperfect information has played a prominent role in modern business cycle theory this paper assesses its importance by estimating the new keynesian nk model under alternative informational assumptions one version focuses on confusion between temporary and persistent disturbances another on unobserved variation in the inflation target of the central bank a third on persistent mis perceptions of the state of the economy measurement error and a fourth assumes perfect information the standard nk dsge version imperfect information is found to contain considerable explanatory power for business fluctuations signal extraction seems to provide a conceptually satisfactory empirically plausible and quantitatively important business cycle mechanism

transparency of information and coordination in economies with investment complementarities how do public and private information affect equilibrium allocations and social welfare in economies with investment complementarities and what is the optimal transparency in the information conveyed for example by economic statistics policy announcements or news in the media we first consider an environment where the complementarities are weak so that the equilibrium is unique no matter the structure of information an increase in the precision of public information may have the perverse effect of increasing aggregate volatility nevertheless as long as there is no value to lotteries welfare unambiguously increases with an increase in either the relative or the absolute precision of public information hence full transparency is optimal this is because more transparency facilitates more effective coordination which is valuable from a social perspective on the other hand when complementarities are strong enough that multiple equilibria are possible more transparency permits the market to coordinate more effectively on either the bad or the good equilibrium in this case constructive ambiguity becomes optimal if there is a high risk that more transparency will lead to coordination failures this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a single judge solution to beauty contests we show that the equilibrium policy rule in beauty contest models is equivalent to that of a single agent s forecast of the economic fundamental this forecast is conditional on a modified information process which simply discounts the precision of idiosyncratic shocks by the degree of strategic complementarity the result holds for any linear gaussian signal process static or persistent stationary or nonstationary exogenous or endogenous and also extends to network games theoretically this result provides a sharp characterization of the equilibrium and its properties under dynamic information practically it provides a straightforward method to solve models with complicated information structures

can information heterogeneity explain the exchange rate determination puzzle empirical evidence shows that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flow and not to macroeconomic variables we introduce symmetric information dispersion about future macroeconomic fundamentals in a dynamic rational expectations model in order to explain these stylized facts consistent with the evidence the model implies that a observed fundamentals account for little of exchange rate volatility in the short to medium run b over long horizons the exchange rate is closely related to observed fundamentals c exchange rate changes are a weak predictor of future fundamentals and d the exchange rate is closely related to order flow

business cycle dynamics under rational inattention we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with rational inattention and compare its predictions to data households and decision makers in firms have limited attention and optimally allocate their attention rational inattention is the only source of slow adjustment the model matches the empirical impulse responses to monetary policy shocks and aggregate technology shocks at the same time profit losses and utility losses from inattention are very small furthermore it matters whether one uses this model or a conventional dsge model for policy analysis

productivity growth consumer confidence and the business cycle abstract the objective of this paper is to provide in the context of a dynamic general equilibrium model an answer to the following five questions 1 to what extent does an economy subject to regular variations in labor productivity growth differ from one where labor productivity is constant 2 what is the impact on major macro indicators of a one time change in labor productivity growth 3 what are the business cycle implications of autonomous non falsifiable changes in growth expectations 4 what is the potential of such expectation changes for explaining the volatility of consumption to output ratio 5 can autonomous changes in growth expectations help us understand recent business cycle episodes

financial innovation the discovery of risk and the u s credit crisis abstract financial innovation and overconfidence about the risk of new financial products were key factors behind the 2008 u s credit crisis we show that a model with a collateral constraint in which learning about the risk of a new financial environment interacts with fisherian amplification produces a boom bust cycle in debt asset prices and consumption early realizations of a high borrowing ability regime turn agents optimistic about the persistence probability of this regime conversely the first realization of a low borrowing ability regime turns agents unduly pessimistic the model predicts large increases in household debt land prices and excess returns during 1998 2006 followed by a collapse

expectation shocks and learning as drivers of the business cycle psychological factors market sentiments and less than fully rational shifts in beliefs are widely believed to play a role in the economy yet they are rarely considered in macroeconomic models this paper evaluates the empirical role of expectational shocks on business cycle fluctuations the paper relaxes the rational expectations assumption to exploit survey data on expectations in the estimation of a new keynesian model which allows for learning by economic agents expectation shocks affect the formation of expectations and capture waves of optimism and pessimism that lead agents to form forecasts that deviate from those implied by their learning model the empirical results uncover a crucial role for these novel expectations shocks as a major driving force of the u s business cycle expectation shocks regarding future real activity are the main source of economic fluctuations accounting for roughly half of business cycle fluctuations

news noise and fluctuations an empirical exploration a common view of the business cycle gives a central role to anticipations consumers and firms continuously receive information about the future which is sometimes news and sometimes just noise based on this information consumers and firms choose spending and because of nominal rigidities spending affects output in the short run if ex post the information turns out to be news the economy adjusts gradually to a new level of activity if it turns out to be just noise the economy returns to its initial state therefore the dynamics of news and noise generate both short run and long run changes in aggregate activity this view appears to capture many of the aspects often ascribed to fluctuations the role of animal spirits in affecting demand spirits coming here from a rational reaction to information about the future the role of demand in affecting output in the short run together with the notion that in the long run output follows a natural path determined by fundamentals in this paper we examine whether this view is consistent with the data we reach three main conclusions the first two methodological the third substantive structural vars typically cannot recover news and noise shocks the reason is straightforward if agents face a signal extraction problem and are unable to separate news from noise then the econometrician faced with either the same data as the agents or a subset of these data cannot do it either while structural estimation methods cannot recover the actual time series for news and noise shocks either they can recover underlying structural parameters and thus the relative role and dynamic effects of news and noise shocks estimation of both a simple model and then of a more elaborate dsge model suggest that agents indeed solve such a signal extraction problem and that noise shocks play an important role in determining short run dynamics recent efforts to estimate business cycle models in which expectations about the future play an important role include christiano et al 2010 and schmitt grohe and uribe 2012 those papers follow the approach of jaimovich and rebelo 2009 and model news as perfectly anticipated productivity changes that will occur at

expectations learning and business cycle fluctuations this paper explores an alternative theory based on learning dynamics in the con text of an otherwise standard stochastic growth model we consider an environment in which households and firms have an incomplete model of the macroeconomy knowing only their own objectives constraints and beliefs agents are optimizing have a completely specified belief system but do not know the equilibrium map ping between primitive disturbances the aggregate state of the economy and mar ket clearing prices by extrapolating from historical patterns in observed data they approximate this mapping to forecast variables that are exogenous to their decision problems such as the rental rate of capital and the real wage this belief structure has the property that beliefs affect the true data generating process of the economy which in turn affects belief formation the economy is therefore self referential shifts in beliefs about future returns to labor and capital affect current market clear ing prices which in turn can reinforce beliefs in this environment current prices can become less informative about future economic conditions generating fluctuations in real activity this kind of mechanism driving business cycle fluctuations is found in early writ ings on macroeconomic dynamics for example alfred c pigou 1927 on page 122 writes

strategies against shocks in power systems an analysis for the case of europe abstract electricity systems are constantly exposed to geopolitical techno economic and natural uncertainties that may endanger security of supply therefore it is crucial that policy makers concerned about it consider a variety of possible futures and not only the one that is perceived as the most likely in particular they should account for the possibility of sudden shocks in their decisions with the goal of making the system more robust however long term power system models which are an important pillar of policy decision making are typically designed to determine the cost minimal power system for a specific expected future such a system is not necessarily the most robust one by combining the classic investment optimization approach with the tools of robust decision making we analyze the viability of different strategies that may potentially increase the robustness of a power system for the case of the european power system we pursue a dedicated analysis with the european power system model limes eu based on a total of more than 40 000 model runs we find that strategies promoting the ability of countries to always produce at least 95 of their electricity demand domestically significantly help to reduce the loss of load in case of shocks such a strategy is not cost optimal for the expected future without shocks but the additional costs about 0 1 of total system costs are low compared to the benefits of significantly increasing the power system s robustness

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

information markets and the comovement of asset prices traditional asset pricing models predict that covariance between prices of difierent assets should be lower than what we observe in the data this model generates high covariance within a rational expectations framework by introducing markets for information about asset payofis when information is costly rational investors will not buy information about all assets they will learn about a subset because information production has high flxed costs competitive producers charge more for low demand information than for high demand information a price that declines in quantity makes investors want to purchase a common subset of information if investors price many assets using a common subset of information then a shock to one signal is passed on as a common shock to many asset prices these common shocks to asset prices generate excess covariance the cross sectional and time series properties of asset price covariance are consistent with this explanation

distributed generation and distribution market diversity in europe the unbundling of the electricity power system will play a key role on the deployment of distributed generation dg in european distribution systems evolving towards smart grids the present paper firstly reviews the relevant european union eu regulatory framework specific attention is paid to the concept of unbundling of power distribution sector in europe afterwards the focus is on the current state of penetration of dg technologies in the eu member states and the corresponding interrelations with distribution features a comparison between the unbundling of the distribution and supply markets using econometric indicators such as the herfindahl hirschmann ihh and the shannon wiener isw indices is then presented finally a comparative analysis between these indices and the current level of penetration of distributed generation in most eu is shown policy recommendations conclude the paper

diversity and security in uk electricity generation the influence of low carbon objectives abstract we explore the relationship between low carbon objectives and the strategic security of electricity in the context of the uk electricity system we consider diversity of fuel source mix to represent one dimension of security robustness against interruptions of any one source and apply two different diversity indices to the range of electricity system scenarios produced by the uk government and independent researchers our results show that low carbon objectives are uniformly associated with greater long term diversity in uk electricity generation with reference to data on wind generation we also consider the impact of source variability on a second dimension of security the reliability of generation availability we conclude that this does not undermine our fundamental conclusion that low carbon scenarios are associated with greater strategic security of supply in uk electricity we discuss reasons for this result explore sensitivities and briefly discuss possible policy instruments associated with diversity and their limitations

does welfare play any role in female headship decisions abstract previous studies have examined whether the welfare system has contributed to the dramatic increase in single parent families this paper explores why the results in this literature are sensitive to the presence of state fixed effects it considers one natural explanation namely that the composition of the population differs across states in ways that are related to welfare program generosity after controlling for individual effects the results provide no evidence that welfare raises the propensity to form female headed households for either whites or blacks these results illustrate the potential pitfalls of assuming that state factors are fixed over a long period of time they also suggest that previous studies may have overstated the effect of welfare programs on family structure

robustness information processing constraints and the current account in small open economies article i nfo in this paper we examine the effects of two types of induced uncertainty model uncertainty due to robust ness rb and state uncertainty due to finite information processing capacity called rational inattention or ri on consumption and the current account we show that the combination of rb and ri improves the model s predictions for i the contemporaneous correlation between the current account and income and ii the volatility and persistence of the current account in small open emerging and developed economies in addition we show that the two informational frictions improve the model s ability to match the impulse response of consumption to income and the relative volatility of consumption to income growth

from dark to light skin color and wages among african americans this paper develops and tests a theory referred to as preference for whiteness which predicts that the interracial white black and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens using data drawn from the multi city study of urban inequality and the national survey of black americans we report evidence largely consistent with the theory moreover we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps and find that favorable treatment of lighter skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory

efficient utilization of resources in public schools a case study of new jersey the academic performance of public schools in the united states has been declining for more than two decades now and this is a hotly debated topic since this deterioration in performance has important implications on the quality of labour and on the productivity growth of the nation bishop 1989 moreover the performance among school districts in states varies significantly raising questions about the factors contributing to the large variability in performance one area where the current debate has been focused is the ability and quality of the school management to use the available resources efficiently giving rise to the issues of a voucher system and the private management of the public schools this study measures the efficiency of public schools for the state of new jersey using the data envelopment analysis dea method it also examines the effect of certain socio economic factors on efficiency we find that the average efficiency for all schools is 81 the wealthiest districts have an effi

the american welfare system and family structure an historical perspective cross sectional studies find a positive relationship between a state s welfare benefits and single motherhood but is this evidence of a welfare effect or rather of cross state differences in social attitudes that influence both policy and behavior this paper demonstrates that the spatial variation in welfare policy long preceded the spatial correlation of policy and behavior undermining the social norm hypothesis but the findings also raise doubts about the role that welfare policy played in the changes in family structure over the century the correlation between welfare benefits and family structure only appears in 1970 and then only for whites

indicator variables for optimal policy the optimal weights on indicators in models with partial information about the state of the economy and forward looking variables are derived and interpreted both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment an example of optimal monetary policy with a partially observable potential output and a forward looking indicator is examined the optimal response to the optimal estimate of potential output displays certainty equivalence whereas the optimal response to the imperfect observation of output depends on the noise in this observation

why do forecasters disagree lessons from the term structure of cross sectional dispersion abstract key sources of disagreement among economic forecasters are identified by using data on cross sectional dispersion in forecasters long and short run predictions of macroeconomic variables dispersion among forecasters is highest at long horizons where private information is of limited value and lower at short forecast horizons moreover differences in views persist through time such differences in opinion cannot be explained by differences in information sets our results indicate they stem from heterogeneity in priors or models differences in opinion move countercyclically with heterogeneity being strongest during recessions where forecasters appear to place greater weight on their prior beliefs

learning asymmetries in real business cycles when a boom ends the downturn is generally sharp and short when growth resumes the boom is more gradual our explanation rests on learning about productivity when agents believe productivity is high they work invest and produce more more production generates higher precision information when the boom ends precise estimates of the slowdown prompt decisive reactions investment and labor fall sharply when growth resumes low production yields noisy estimates of recovery noise impedes learning slows recovery and makes booms more gradual than downturns a calibrated model generates growth rate asymmetry similar to macroeconomic aggregates fluctuations in agents forecast precision match observed countercyclical errors of forecasters

energy security and improvements in the function of diversity indices taiwan energy supply structure case study abstract facing the risk and uncertainty inherent in social and economic development many countries have adopted an energy supply diversification strategy in their energy security policy to control the energy import risk and cost to ensure that sufficient energy can be obtained at an affordable price level diversification helps the energy system respond to external changes and shocks diversification can also lessen the vulnerability of a single energy source to supply shocks and the market power of various energy supply sources this study develops the diversity reliability index and co vary diversity reliability index based on the hirschman herfindahl and shannon wiener indices investigates the contribution of different energy sources to the energy system and analyzes the covariance between various energies and their impacts on energy security to determine the impact of energy diversity in reducing the risk of energy supply shortages and cost fluctuations

when can changes in expectations cause business cycle fluctuations in neo classical settings abstract it is often argued that changes in expectation are an important driving force of the business cycle however it is well known that changes in expectations cannot generate positive co movement between consumption investment and employment in the most standard neo classical business cycle models this gives rise to the question of whether changes in expectation can cause business cycle fluctuations in any neo classical setting or whether such a phenomenon is inherently related to market imperfections this paper offers a systematic exploration of this issue our finding is that expectation driven business cycle fluctuations can arise in neo classical models when one allows for a sufficiently rich description of the production technology however such a structure is rarely allowed or explored in macro models in particular we identify a multi sector setting and a setting with a costly distribution system in which expectation driven business cycles can arise

information heterogeneity and market incompleteness information is market consistent if agents only use market prices to infer the underlying states of the economy this paper applies this concept to a stochastic growth model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents the economy with market consistent information can never replicate the full information equilibrium and there are substantial differences in impulse responses to aggregate productivity shocks these results are robust to the introduction of a noisy public signal and aggregate financial markets we argue that the principle of market consistent information should be applied to any model with incomplete markets

the effect of gnp announcements on fluctuations of gnp growth abstract this paper is an empirical study of the degree in which perceptions affect the evolution of the economy we study the effects of the announcements that the government makes on gnp growth these announcements are subject to a substantial degree of noise and its accuracy improves with time a revised number is published several years after the first announcement was made public we consider that the final revision is the true value of gnp growth we show that once announcements are taken into account the true value of gnp growth at time t has no predictive power in determining growth at any future time all the predictive power lies in the announcements and not in the true level of growth actually we show that the variable that determines future growth is the unexpected part of the announcements we also show that announcements affect growth via aggregate investment

female headship feminization of poverty and welfare female headed households are at greater risk of slipping into poverty than male headed households indeed sex and marital status of the head of household are the most important determinants of a familys poverty status in the us divorce separation death of a husband and out of wedlock births can lead to female headship transfer payments especially the aid to families with dependent children program are blamed for contributing to increased marital instability and out of wedlock births the authors examined the role of welfare benefits in influencing female headship preliminary results using standard estimation procedures indicate that transfers do not significantly influence female headship standard estimation procedures are however erroneous because they ignore differences in propensities to establish mother only households therefore adjusting for differences in propensities to establish female headed households the level of welfare benefits is indeed an important factor in explaining the variation in the changes in the birth rates to unmarried women the use of a weighted measure suggests that welfare benefits by increasing female headship of women who otherwise have low propensities to be female heads have played a significant role in the feminization of poverty

limited information capacity as a source of inertia abstract we derive optimal time dependent adjustment rules from shannon s 1948 information theory in a continuous time lq prediction problem with a costly rate of information acquisition processing the optimal prediction evolves smoothly but jumps at an optimally chosen frequency when fresh information accrues a more volatile and persistent target raises the information rate required to maintain a sampling frequency this cost effect moderates and may even reverse the benefit effect on the value of information so optimal inertia is unresponsive to and nonmonotonic in the predictability of the environment conventional models with a fixed cost per observation imply no such cost effect so inertia rises quickly in the predictability of the environment

indicator variables for optimal policy under asymmetric information the optimal weights on indicators in models with partial information about the state of the economy and forward looking variables are derived and interpreted both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment the private sector is assumed to have more information about the state of the economy than the policymaker certainty equivalence holds for the optimal reaction function in state space form t he coefficients are independent of the degree of uncertainty about the state of the economy however in the case of commitment certainty equivalence does not hold for the reaction function in integrative form the policy instrument cannot be written as a distributed lag of past estimates of past states of the economy instead optimal policy will generally depend on new estimates of past states of the economy and in ways that depend on the information structure furthermore the usual separation principle does not hold since the estimation of the state of the economy is not independent of optimization and is in general quite complex we present a general characterization of optimal filtering and control in settings of this kind and discuss an application of our methods to the problem of the optimal use of real time macroeconomic data in the conduct of monetary policy

inattentive professional forecasters abstract using the ecb survey of professional forecasters to characterize expectations at the micro level we emphasize two new facts forecasters i fail to systematically update their forecasts and ii disagree even when updating it is moreover found that forecasters have predictable forecast errors these facts are qualitatively supportive of recent models of inattention and suggest a setup where agents imperfectly process information due to both sticky information a la mankiw reis and noisy information a la sims however building and estimating such an expectation model we find that it cannot quantitatively replicate the error and disagreement observed in the data

what can survey forecasts tell us about information rigidities a lot we derive common and conflicting predictions from models in which agents face information constraints and then assess their validity using surveys of consumers firms central bankers and professional forecasters we document that mean forecasts fail to completely adjust on impact to shocks leading to statistically and economically significant deviations from the null of full information the dynamics of forecast errors after shocks are consistent with the predictions of models with information rigidities the conditional responses of forecast errors and disagreement among agents can also be used to differentiate between some of the most prominent models of information rigidities

optimal monetary policy with imperfect common knowledge we study optimal nominal demand policy in a flexible price economy with monopolistic competition where firms have imperfect common knowledge about the shocks hitting the economy information imperfections emerge endogenously because firms are assumed to have finite shannon capacity to process information we then ask how policy that minimizes a quadratic objective in output and prices depends on firms processing capacity when price setting decisions of firms are strategic complements we find that policy should nominally accommodate white noise mark up shocks for a large range of capacity values this fi nding is robust to the policy maker observing shocks imperfectly or being uncertain about firms processing capacity when mark up shocks are persistent accommodation may even have to increase in the medium term but has to decrease in the long run thereby generating a hump shaped price response and a slow reduction in output instead when prices are strategic substitutes policy tends to react with nominal demand contractions to mark up shocks in addition there might exist discontinuities between common knowledge equilibria and equilibria with small amounts of imperfect common knowledge

firms and aggregate dynamics abstract we investigate the role of permanent and transitory shocks for firms and aggregate dynamics we find that permanent shocks to productivity and permanent shifts in the composition of output explain at least four fifths of firms dynamics however these permanent shocks are almost uncorrelated across firms and are therefore less relevant for aggregate dynamics transitory shocks on the other hand are not very important at the firm level but they account for most of the volatility of aggregate hours and output because they are significantly correlated across firms finally we try to make some progress on the interpretation of the shocks

communication and monetary policy recent trends toward greater central bank independence and the adoption of formal inflation targeting by several countries have served to emphasize the importance of communication policy in this paper we explore some of the economic effects of public information that arise whenever public information serves the dual role of conveying fundamental information as well as serving as a focal point for better coordination more precise public information is a double edged tool while it is very effective in influencing actions through coordination sometimes it can be too effective and coordinate actions away from fundamentals copyright 2002 oxford university press

forecasting the forecasts of others implications for asset pricing we develop a dynamic asset pricing model with heterogeneously informed agents unlike previous research we focus on the general case where differential information leads to the problem of forecasting the forecasts of others and to non trivial dynamics of higher order expectations in particular we prove that the model does not admit a finite number of state variables using numerical analysis we compare equilibria characterized by identical fundamentals but different information structure we demonstrate that the distribution of information has substantial impact on equilibrium prices and returns in particular we show that asymmetric information can generate momentum in returns and high trading volume

a traditional interpretation of macroeconomic fluctuations under the traditional interpretation of macroeconomic fluctuations aggregate demand shocks move output and prices in the same direction while aggregate supply shocks move output and prices in opposite directions this paper examines the joint behavior of u s output unemployment prices wages and nominal money and asks whether it is consistent with this interpretation the answer is a qualified yes

on the optimal monetary policy response to noisy indicators abstract we describe a behavior of a central bank when its measures of current inflation and output are subject to measurement errors in a framework of optimizing models with nominal price stickiness in our model a central bank sets the interest rate equal to its current estimate of the so called wicksellian natural rate of interest this is shown to imply that the interest rate responds to the central bank s estimates of both current inflation and output gap as advocated by taylor 1993 it is also shown that the noise contained in the indicators justifies a degree of policy cautiousness a reduced form representation of optimal policy should exhibit interest rate smoothing which is often found in the empirical literature on monetary policy reaction functions

how well does the is lm model fit postwar u s data postwar u s time series for money interest rates prices and gnp are characterized by a multivariate process driven by four exogenous disturbances those disturbances are identified so that they can be interpreted as the four main sources of fluctuations found in the is lm phillips curve model money supply money demand is and aggregate supply shocks the dynamic properties of the estimated model are analyzed and shown to match most of the stylized predictions of the model the estimated decomposition is also used to measure the relative importance of each shock to interpret some macroeconomic episodes and to study sources of permanent shocks to nominal variables

diversity and ignorance in electricity supply investment addressing the solution rather than the problem the need for diversity has been cited as a rationale for important recent investment decisions in the uk electricity supply sector it is invoked as the principal argument for continuing major government intervention yet there exists no formal analytical basis for the concept why is diversity good what is meant by diversification what is it that must be diversified what trade off should be struck between diversity and other measures of performance the resulting ambiguity causes confusion and is vulnerable to special pleading despite this this paper argues that diversification offers a superior alternative to probabilistic approaches towards uncertainty and ignorance in electricity supply investments and proposes a formal analytical approach a quantitative index of diversity is borrowed from information theory and used to derive a value for the government s implicit willingness to pay for diversity in the uk electricity supply mix this is then applied in a pilot exercise to the problem of optimizing the diversity and financial performance of the supply portfolio although provisional the results are relevant to the government s forthcoming nuclear review particularly in assessing the relative levels of support for nuclear power and renewable energy

an exploration into pigou s theory of cycles abstract this paper explores a theory of business cycles in which recessions and booms arise due to difficulties encountered by agents in properly forecasting the economy s future needs in terms of capital the idea has a long history in the macroeconomic literature as reflected by the work of pigou industrial fluctuation macmillan london 1926 the contribution of this paper is twofold first we illustrate the type of general equilibrium structure that can give rise to such phenomena second we examine the extent to which such a model can explain the observed pattern of u s recessions frequency depth without relying on technological regress we argue that such a model offer a framework for understanding elements of both the recent u s recession and of the asia downturns of the late 1990s

rational choice culture of poverty and the intergenerational transmission of welfare dependency it has now become evident that contrary to the expectations of the proponents of the great society a significant number of recipients of transfer benefits have welfare careers that last for many years prolonged reliance on welfare has generated a wide range of issues related to the process and patterns of welfare dependency and has raised questions about how best to reform welfare policy for example it has been suggested that welfare use is addictive creating a welfare culture that is transmitted across generations glicken 7 31 states that most recipients of afdc benefits are those people whose parents were recipients people who have been socialized into the welfare system as children duncan hill and hoffman 5 469 on the other hand investigate the patterns of welfare dependence among afdc recipients and conclude that t he stereotype of heavy welfare dependence being routinely passed from mother to child is contradicted other studies 2 24 have suggested that there are significant racial differences in the duration of time on welfare pointing to a race based dependency pattern rank 24 for example finds that black women remain on welfare for significantly longer periods than white women specifically he finds the median number of months on welfare to be 21 6 months for white women and 45 2 for black women 2 other studies have suggested that long time welfare use

examining the resilience of national energy systems measurements of diversity in production based and consumption based electricity in the globalization of trade networks abstract energy is a critical component of achieving sustainable development in addition to the three aspects of promoting access renewables and efficiency the dimension of resilience in energy systems should also considered the implementation of resilient energy systems requires a quantitative understanding of the socio economic practices underlying such systems specifically in line with the increasing globalization of trade there remains a critical knowledge gap on the link between embodied energy in the production and consumption of traded goods to bridge this knowledge gap we investigate the resilience of global energy systems through an examination of a diversity measure of global embodied electricity trade based on multi regional input output mrio networks the significance of this research lies in its ability to utilize high resolution mrio data sets in assessing the resilience of national energy systems this research indicates that secure and responsible consumption requires the diversification of not only energy generation but also energy imports this research will lay the ground for further research in the governance of resilience in global energy networks

learning and shifts in long run productivity growth abstract an extensive literature has analyzed the macroeconomic effects of shocks to the level of aggregate productivity however there has been little corresponding research on sustained shifts in the growth rate of productivity in this paper we examine the effects of shocks to productivity growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents do not directly observe whether shocks are transitory or persistent we show that an estimated kalman filter model using real time data describes economists long run productivity growth forecasts in the united states extremely well and that filtering has profound implications for the macroeconomic effects of shifts in productivity growth

setting the right prices for the wrong reasons we consider a model of nominal price adjustment with firm specific and aggregate shocks to economic fundamentals and incomplete dispersed information firms update their expectations about fundamentals based on their own cash flows revenues and wages we show that in a model with realistic levels of product level price dispersion the firms inference about aggregate shocks is very gradual yet in the aggregate prices adjust rapidly in response to aggregate nominal shocks when an aggregate shock occurs firms mistakenly attribute it to firm specific shocks but adjust prices nevertheless since the exact nature of the shock matters little for its optimal pricing decision

a theory of demand shocks this paper presents a model of business cycles driven by shocks to consumer expectations regarding aggregate productivity agents are hit by heterogeneous productivity shocks they observe their own productivity and a noisy public signal regarding aggregate productivity the public signal gives rise to noise shocks which have the features of aggregate demand shocks they increase output employment and inflation in the short run and have no effects in the long run numerical examples suggest that the model can generate sizable equilibrium dsge models of the business cycle include a large number of shocks to technol ogy monetary policy preferences etc but typically do not include expectational shocks as independent drivers of short run fluctuations 1 this paper explores the idea of expectation driven cycles looking at a model where technology determines equilibrium output in the long run and consumers receive noisy signals about technology in the short run the presence of noisy signals produces expectational errors this paper studies the role of these expectational errors in gener ating volatility at business cycle frequencies the model is based on two ingredients first consumers take time to recognize permanent changes in aggregate fundamentals although they may have good information on the current state of the individual firm or sector where they operate they have only limited information regarding the long run determinants of aggregate activity second consumers have access to public information that is relevant to estimate long run productivity this includes news about technological innovations publicly released macroeconomic and sectoral statistics financial market prices and public statements by policy makers however these signals provide only a noisy forecast of the long run effects of technological innovations this opens the door to noise shocks which induce consumers to temporarily overestimate or underestimate the productive capacity of the economy

beauty contests and iterated expectations in asset markets in a financial market where traders are risk averse and short lived and prices are noisy asset prices today depend on the average expectation today of tomorrow s price thus iterating this relationship the date 1 price equals the date 1 average expectation of the date 2 average expectation of the date 3 price this will not in general equal the date 1 average expectation of the date 3 price we show how this failure of the law of iterated expectations for average belief can help understand the role of higher order beliefs in a fully rational asset pricing model and explain over reaction to noisy public information

dynamic pricing and imperfect common knowledge abstract introducing private information into the dynamic pricing decision of firms by adding an idiosyncratic component to marginal cost can help explain two stylised facts about price changes aggregate inflation responds gradually and with inertia to shocks at the same time as individual price changes can be large the inertial behaviour of inflation is driven by privately informed firms strategically herding on the public information contained in the observations of lagged aggregate variables the model also matches the average duration between price changes found in the data and it nests the standard new keynesian phillips curve as a special case to solve the model the paper derives an algorithm for solving a class of dynamic models with higher order expectations

information animal spirits and the meaning of innovations in consumer confidence we show that unexplained innovations in several variables representing survey responses to forwardlooking questions on the michigan survey of consumers have powerful prognostic implications for the future paths of macroeconomic variables we attempt to distinguish the hypothesis that these impulse responses indicate a causal channel from autonomous movements in sentiment to economic outcomes the animal spirits view from the alternative interpretation that the surprise confidence movements summarize information about future economic prospects the information view in natural rate models animal spirits shocks are associated with overshooting of among other variables consumption that attenuates when agents come to grips with their overreaction while information shocks about the long future are followed by gradual movements in macroeconomic variables that are not subsequently reversed in a baseline vector autoregression involving consumption income and confidence the data come down sharply in favor of the information view the impulse responses of consumption and gdp show no tendency to attenuate even after a number of years further confidence innovations have strong implications for labor productivity many quarters into the future in somewhat larger vars with an information block that includes inflation and or stock prices the impulse responses to confidence innovations continue to have the permanent shape that defines information shocks but they are smaller in magnitude we demonstrate that this is due to the fact that both inflation and stock price innovations have prognostic implications for future productivity that are very similar to the implications of innovations in confidence addition of unemployment to the system induces a transitory component that changes the shape of the impulse responses and somewhat weakens the previously airtight case against animal spirits but it does not provide constructive evidence of such effects

employment opportunities of young men and family formation major shifts in family patterns have limited progress toward reducing poverty and narrowing black white income differences much of the recent rise in female headship results from the rising number of never married mothers despite a decline in the proportion of unmarried young women having babies the drop in marriage rate has been so great that a rising proportion of children are under the care of never married mothers the absence of a parent dramatically increases current poverty of children and as sara mclanahan 1988 shows growing up in a poor family and in a mother headed family holding constant for income increases the chances that a child will become poor as an adult a long literature links the creation of mother headed families with the inadequate financial resources of men in 1965 the moynihan report attributed the then high rates of marital disruption among black families to the joblessness of black men but warned that family dissolution might have reached a self perpetuating stage unrelated to employment opportunities did the dramatic increases in one parent families after 1965 reflect such a new self generating pattern or were the job market problems of men the primary cause of the continuing decline in stable intact american families the most forceful recent proponent of the male job opportunity hypothesis hereafter mjo is sociologist william j wilson wilson 1987 argues that the declining number of employed black men relative to black women best explains the increasing proportions of black female headed families clifford johnson and andrew sum 1987 contend that declining real earnings of all young men was a major cause of their declining marriage rates this paper examines the mjo hypothesis with respect to young men and family formation marriage and becoming parents i begin by viewing the mjo hypothesis from the perspective of the economics of the family i then consider evidence from empirical studies of the mjo hypothesis the conclusion notes future policy and research direc

the macroeconomic effects of false announcements suppose that the government were to announce the economy will be booming in six months and this announcement is based on false data what effect would such an announcement have on future aggregate activity this paper employs revisions of the series of leading economic indicators to test the hypothesis that such an announcement would have a positive effect on future activity we find that the evidence is generally consistent with the hypothesis and that for the time period 1976 1988 the expectational shocks measured by these revisions explain over 20 percent of the fluctuation in the quarterly growth rate of industrial production

valuing diversity in energy supply abstract there is renewed interest in the role of supply diversity in promoting energy security this paper explores ways of valuing diversity a possible incentive mechanism for promoting diversity which takes account of underlying disparities between different technology options is developed the mechanism provides a way of trading off cost and diversity and results in an efficient cost diversity frontier by analogy with financial portfolio theory if all technologies are believed to be equally disparate the appropriate mechanism is a levy imposed on market share if the technologies are not equally disparate the levy needs to be adjusted by technology specific multipliers that take account of levels of disparity and patterns of market share the analysis is applied to two stylised situations in the long run equilibrium case the implications of both different patterns of disparity and different values attached to diversity are investigated the paper also explores the implications of applying such a mechanism to the current great britain electricity system the implications in terms of financial flows for both the market as a whole and for individual operators are investigated finally the appropriateness of such a mechanism in the light of other policy goals and possible future research directions is discussed

optimal sticky prices under rational inattention this paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to subject to a constraint on information flow when idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to aggregate conditions when we calibrate the model to match the large average absolute size of price changes observed in micro data prices react fast and by large amounts to idiosyncratic shocks but only slowly and by small amounts to nominal shocks nominal shocks have strong and persistent real effects we use the model to investigate how the optimal allocation of attention and the dynamics of prices depend on the firms environment jel e 3 e5 d8

implications of rational inattention abstract a constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems the resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting

optimal monetary policy with uncertain fundamentals and dispersed information this paper studies optimal monetary policy in a model where aggregate fluctuations are driven by the private sector s uncertainty about the economy s fundamentals information on aggregate productivity is dispersed across agents and there are two aggregate shocks a standard productivity shock and a noise shock affecting public beliefs about aggregate productivity neither the central bank nor individual agents can distinguish the two shocks when they are realized despite the lack of superior information monetary policy can affect the economy s relative response to the two shocks as time passes better information on past fundamentals becomes available the central bank can then adopt a backward looking policy rule based on more precise information about past shocks by announcing its response to future information the central bank can influence the expected real interest rate faced by forward looking consumers with different beliefs and thus affect the equilibrium allocation if the announced future response is sufficiently aggressive the central bank can completely eliminate the effect of noise shocks however this policy is typically suboptimal as it leads to an excessively compressed distribution of relative prices the optimal monetary policy balances the benefits of aggregate stabilization with the costs in terms of cross sectional efficiency copyright wiley blackwell

robust control informational frictions and international consumption correlations abstract in this paper we examine the effects of model misspecification robustness or rb on international consumption correlations in an otherwise standard small open economy model with endogenous capital accumulation we show that in the presence of capital mobility in financial markets rb lowers the international consumption correlations by generating heterogeneous responses of consumption to productivity shocks across countries facing different macroeconomic uncertainty in addition we show that rb can also improve the model s predictions in three other moments of consumption dynamics the relative volatility of consumption to income the persistence of consumption and the correlation between consumption and output after calibrating the rb parameter using the detection error probabilities we show that the model can explain the observed international consumption correlations as well as the other consumption moments quantitatively finally we show that the main conclusions of our benchmark model do not change in an extension in which the agent cannot observe the state perfectly due to finite information processing capacity