We study information substitutability in the financial market through a quasi-natural experiment: the pandemic-triggered lockdown that has hampered people's physical interactions hence the ability to collect, process, and transmit soft information. Exploiting the cross- sectional and time-series...

There is an extensive empirical literature on political business cycles, but its theoretical foundations are grounded in pre-rational expectations macroeconomic theory. Here we show that electoral cycles in taxes, government spending and money growth can be modeled as an equilibrium signaling...

This paper presents some new perspectives on the structure and performance of alternative economic organizations. We posit that decision makers make errors of judgement (for example, they sometimes select bad projects while rejecting good projects), and that how these errors are aggregated...

This paper provides the foundations of a general theory of information and the capital market. We show that in a pure gambling market, even with asymmetric information, there cannot exist an equilibrium with trade with rational individuals. We argue that although a pure exchange stock market is...

Employment matches under uncertainty are typically accompanied by opportunities for information acquisition. Workers can acquire specific information about productivity lotteries at the firm or general information affecting their probabilistic beliefs about work elsewhere. Enterprises can...

This represents two chapters of a proposed book co-authored by Bob Evenson and myself. The subject is relationships between agricultural productivity, research and information. The first chapter of this part is concerned with the "theory" of the value of information. Among other things, the...

Uncertainty in both financial markets and the real economy rises sharply during recessions. We develop a model of informational interdependence between financial markets and the real economy, linking uncertainty to information production and aggregate economic activities. We argue that there...

We propose a new approach to modeling the cost of information structures in rational inattention problems, the "neighborhood-based" cost functions. These cost functions have two properties that we view as desirable: they summarize the results of a sequential evidence accumulation problem, and...

We document a new fact about expectations: in response to the main shocks driving the business cycle, expectations under-react initially but over-shoot later on. We show how previous, seemingly conflicting, evidence can be understood as different facets of this fact. We finally explain what the...

In absence of insurance contracts to share risk, public information is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it empowers self-insurance as agents better react to shocks, reducing risk. On the other hand, it weakens market-insurance as common knowledge of shocks restricts trading risk. We embody...