We survey work using Bayesian learning in macroeconomics, highlighting common themes and new directions. First, we present many of the common types of learning problems agents face---signal extraction problems---and trace out their effects on macro aggregates, in different strategic settings....

The DeGroot model has emerged as a credible alternative to the standard Bayesian model for studying learning on networks, offering a natural way to model naive learning in a complex setting. One unattractive aspect of this model is the assumption that the process starts with every node in the...

We study the perfect Bayesian equilibrium of a model of learning over a general social network. Each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world, observes the past actions of a stochastically-generated neighborhood of individuals, and chooses one of two possible actions....

This paper develops a model of Bayesian learning from online reviews, and investigates the conditions for asymptotic learning of the quality of a product and the speed of learning under different rating systems. A rating system provides information about reviews left by previous customers. A...

The central question we address in this paper is: what can an analyst infer from choice data about what a decision maker has learned? The key constraint we impose, which is shared across models of Bayesian learning, is that any learning must be rationalizable. To implement this constraint, we...

The literature on the optimal harvest of fisheries has concentrated on a single fishing area with biomass uncertainty and to a lesser degree also with price uncertainty. We develop and implement a stochastic optimal control approach to determine the harvest that maximizes the value of a fishery...

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The "synthetic control" is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit's pre-treatment outcomes and other covariates as closely as...

Using optimal control theory and a vector autoregressive representation of the relationship between money and interest rates, one can derive a feedback control procedure which defines the best possible tradeoff between interest rate volatility and money supply fluctuations and which could be...

We extend the control function approach of Altonji and Mansfield (2018) to allow for multiple group levels and complementarities. Our analysis provides a foundation for causal interpretation of multilevel mixed effects models in the presence of sorting. In our empirical application, we obtain...

We develop a quantitative framework for exploring how individuals trade off the utility benefit of social activity against the internal and external health risks that come with social interactions during a pandemic. We calibrate the model to external targets and then compare its predictions with...