We develop a model of monetary policy with two key features: (i) the central bank has private information about its long-run target for the policy rate; and (ii) the central bank is averse to bond-market volatility. In this setting, discretionary monetary policy is gradualist, or inertial, in the...

In SIR models, infection rates are typically exogenous, whereas individuals adjust their behavior in reality. City-level data across the globe suggest that mobility falls in response to fear, proxied by Google searches. Incorporating experimentally validated measures of social preferences at the...

Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, as assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian...