We explore how optimal information choices change the predictions of strategic models. When a large number of agents play a game with strategic complementarity, information choices exhibit complementarity as well: If an agent wants to do what others do, they want to know what others know. This...

When similar patterns of expansion and contraction are observed across sectors, we call this a business cycle. Yet explaining the similarity and synchronization of these cycles across industries remains a puzzle. Whereas output growth across industries is highly correlated, identifiable shocks,...

Does the pattern of social connections between individuals matter for macroeconomic outcomes? If so, how does this effect operate and how big is it? Using network analysis tools, we explore how different social structures affect technology diffusion and thereby a country’s rate of...

A fruitful emerging literature reveals that shocks to uncertainty can explain asset returns, business cycles and financial crises. The literature equates uncertainty shocks with changes in the variance of an innovation whose distribution is common knowledge. But how do such shocks arise? This...

How to evaluate a fund manager’s skill is a central question in empirical finance. Prior literature has defined skill as an ability to either pick stocks or time the market, at all times. We propose a new definition of skill as a general cognitive ability used in different ways at different...

Much of the increase in female labour force participation in the post-war period has come from the entry of married women with young children. Accompanying this change has been a rise in cultural acceptance of maternal employment. We argue that the concurrent S shaped rise in maternal...

A growing and deepening divide has opened up between countries where economic development has “taken off” and those caught in a vicious cycle of institutional backwardness and macroeconomic instability. This “Great Divide” is visible in almost every measure of economic performance, such...

This Paper analyses the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy in a general equilibrium model of securities markets and banking with asymmetric information. Banks' optimal asset/liability policy is such that in equilibrium capital adequacy constraints are always binding. Asymmetric...

In an environment characterized by weak contractual enforcement, sovereign lenders can enhance the likelihood of repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure. We show within a simple model how competition for repayment between lenders may result in sovereign debt that is...

We analyze contagious sovereign debt crises in financially integrated economies. Under financial integration banks optimally diversify their holdings of sovereign debt in an effort to minimize the costs with respect to an individual country's sovereign debt default. While diversification...