We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...

Who participates in transactions when information about the consequences must be learned? We show theoretically that decision makers for whom acquiring and processing information is more costly respond more strongly to changes in incentive payments for participating and decide to participate...

Most studies of gender discrimination consider how male versus female candidates are assessed given otherwise identical information about them. But, in many settings of interest, evaluators have a choice about how much information to acquire about a candidate before making a final assessment. We...

Using the framework provided by the asymmetric-information and real-options theories, we examine the impact of uncertainty on firms' decisions and market outcomes. We construct alternative measures of uncertainty based on survey of professional forecasters and our estimation of regression-based...

Recent theoretical work in the economics of climate change has suggested that climate policy is highly sensitive to "fat-tailed" risks of catastrophic outcomes (Weitzman, 2009b). Such risks are suggested to be an inevitable consequence of scientific uncertainty about the effects of increased...