We explore the business cycle implications of expectation shocks and of two well-known psychological biases, optimism and overconfidence. The expectations of optimistic agents are biased toward good outcomes, while overconfident agents overestimate the precision of the signals that they receive....

It is well known that the neoclassical model does not generate comovement among macroeconomic aggregates in response to news about future total factor productivity. We show that this problem is generally more severe in open economy versions of the neoclassical model. We present an open economy...

This paper suggests that the interaction between firms’ entry and exit decisions and variation in the degree of competition gives rise to endogenous procyclical movements in measured total factor productivity (TFP). Based on this result, the paper suggests a simple structural method for the...

This paper analyzes how the indeterminacy of competitive equilibrium in one-sector growth models depends on the magnitude of the households' income effect on the demand for leisure. The paper first establishes that the presence of income effect is necessary for the existence of an indeterminate...

This paper analyzes how the interaction between firms’ entry-and-exit decisions and variations in competition gives rise to self-fulfilling, expectation-driven fluctuations in aggregate economic activity and in measured total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis is based on a dynamic...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. Individual belief is modeled by a state variable that defines an individual's perceived laws of motion. We use a New Keynesian Model that is solved with a quadratic approximation hence individual decisions are quadratic...

This paper analyzes the requirements for a social welfare-optimized transition path toward a carbon-free economy, focusing particularly on the deployment of low-carbon technologies, and the roles of engineering upgrading of extant facilities, and directed R&D to enhancing their productivity. The...

This paper reports research focused on the inter-temporal resource allocation requirements of a program of technological changes that would halt global warming by completing the transition to a "green" production regime (i.e., zero net CO2-emissions) within the possibly brief finite interval...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and natural resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of U.S. Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales where we estimate the model, and...

The first version of this paper was presented to the Conference on R&D, Education and Productivity, held in Memory of Zvi Griliches (1930 –1999) on 25-27th, August 2003 at Carr? des Sciences, Ministère de la Recherche, Paris, France. Gabriel Goddard furnished characteristically swift and...