The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

This paper argues that stress tests encompassing the entire banking sector (macro stress tests) can be designed to improve welfare. We develop a multi-receiver framework of Bayesian persuasion to show that a banking supervisor can create value when he commits to disclose the stress-testing...

This paper investigates whether information complementarities can explain the strong patterns of sectoral comovement observed empirically. It tests the theoretical model by Veldkamp and Wolfers (2007), which suggests that fi rms' output decisions are based on aggregate information rather than...

This paper provides a two-part empirical analysis on how actuarial reduction rates for early retirement affect current pension payments in Germany and to what extent the existence and the magnitude of these reduction rates influence people s retirement planning. First, by evaluating a large...

The design and analysis of optimal monetary policy is usually guided by the paradigm of homogeneous rational expectations. Instead, we examine the dynamic consequences of implementation strategies, when the actual economy features expectational heterogeneity. Agents have either rational or...

An emerging economic literature has found evidence that wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midlife but beneficially abandoned and experienced with less regret during old age. In a unique...

We present an experiment in which extrinsic signals may generate sunspot equilibria. The game has a unique symmetric non-sunspot equilibrium, which is also risk dominant. Other equilibria can be ordered according to risk dominance. By comparing treatments with different information structure, we...

Forming expectations about the future path of the economy and the own business prospects is not costless for a fi rm. Instead, acquiring and processing the relevant macroeconomic information requires valuable resources. One important source of information that provides a coding service is the...

Inflation expectations are often found to depend on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of households, such as age, income and education, however, the reasons for this systematic heterogeneity are not yet fully understood. Since accounting for these expectation differentials could help...