We study the Ramsey policy problem in an economy in which firms face a collateral constraint. Issuing more public debt alleviates this friction by increasing the aggregate quantity of collateral. In so doing, however, the issuance of more debt also raises interest rates, which in turn increases...

This paper studies the optimal trade-off between commitment and flexibility in an intertemporal consumption/savings choice model. Individuals expect to receive relevant information regarding their own situation and tastes - generating a value for flexibility - but also expect to suffer from...

This paper investigates who incomplete information impacts the response of prices to nominal shocks. Our baseline model is a variant of the Calvo model in which firms observe the underlying nominal shocks with noise. In this model, the response of prices is pinned down by three parameters: the...

What are the welfare effects of the information contained in macroeconomic statistics, central-bank communications, or news in the media? We address this question in a business-cycle framework that nests the neoclassical core of modern DSGE models. Earlier lessons that were based on "beauty...

We study optimal monetary policy in an environment in which firms' pricing and production decisions are subject to informational frictions. Our framework accommodates multiple formalizations of these frictions, including dispersed private information, sticky information, and certain forms of...

This paper revisits the macroeconomic effects of government consumption in the neoclassical growth model augmented with idiosyncratic investment (or entrepreneurial) risk. Under complete markets, a permanent increase in government consumption has no long-run effect on the interest rate, the...

Global games of regime change -- that is, coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it -- have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We...

How do public and private information affect equilibrium allocations and social welfare in economies with investment complementarities? And what is the optimal transparency in the information conveyed, for example, by economic statistics, policy announcements, or news in the media? We first...

Bigger governments raise the possibilities for corruption; more corruption may in turn raise the support for redistributive policies that intend to correct the inequality and injustice generated by corruption. We formalize these insights in a simple dynamic model. A positive feedback from past...

Financial markets look at data on aggregate investment for clues about underlying profitability. At the same time, firms' investment depends on expected equity prices. This generates a two-way feedback between financial market prices and investment. In this paper we study the positive and...