Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper shows that the answer is yes under certain "emergency" conditions. These emergency conditions--zero interest rates and deflation--were satisfied during the Great Depression...

This paper suggests that the US recovery from the Great Depression was driven by a shift in expectations. This shift was caused by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policy actions. On the monetary policy side, Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and -- even more importantly -- announced...

The paper proposes a theory of efficient perceptual distortions, in which the statistical relation between subjective perceptions and the objective state minimizes the error of the state estimate, subject to a constraint on information processing capacity. The theory is shown to account for...

A model is proposed in which stochastic choice results from noise in cognitive processing rather than random variation in preferences. The mental process used to make a choice is nonetheless optimal, subject to a constraint on available information-processing capacity that is motivated by...

The authors study the movements in output, consumption, and hours that are forecastable from a vector autoregression and analyze how they differ from those predicted by standard real-business-cycle models. They show that actual forecastable movements in output have a variance about one hundred...