This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. We find that equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible...

Based on OECD evidence, equity/housing-price busts and credit crunches are followed by substantial increases in public consumption. These increases in unproductive public spending lead to increases in distortionary marginal taxes, a policy in sharp contrast with presumably optimal Keynesian...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...

A large literature suggests that the expected equity risk premium is countercyclical. Using a variety of different measures for this risk premium, we document that it also exhibits growth asymmetry, i.e. the risk premium rises sharply in recessions and declines much more gradually during the...

Modern investors face a high-dimensional prediction problem: thousands of observable variables are potentially relevant for forecasting. We reassess the conventional wisdom on market efficiency in light of this fact. In our model economy, which resembles a typical machine learning setting, N...

We study optimal experimentation by a monopolistic platform in a two-sided market. The platform provider is uncertain about the strength of the externality each side is exerting on the other. Setting participation fees on both sides, it gradually learns about these externalities by observing...

This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation in which the players have access to two-armed bandits where the risky arm distributes lumpsum payoffs according to a Poisson process with unknown intensity. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in...

We establish convergence of beliefs and actions in a class of one-dimensional learning settings in which the agent's model is misspecified, she chooses actions endogenously, and the actions affect how she misinterprets information. Our stochastic-approximation-based methods rely on two crucial...

We study a game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits where the risky arm distributes lump-sum payoffs according to a Poisson process. Its intensity is either high or low, and unknown to the players. We consider Markov perfect equilibria with beliefs as the state variable and show...

This paper analyzes the case of a principal who wants to provide an agent with proper incentives to explore a hypothesis that can be either true or false. The agent can shirk, thus never proving the hypothesis, or he can avail himself of a known technology to produce fake successes. This latter...