The paper surveys the recent work on economics of information with endogenous information structures where individuals can directly communicate information with each other. We consider the theoretical work on cheap talk, Bayesian persuasion, and information design, and review the implications of...

Developing countries employ a very large share of their workforce in agriculture, a sector in which their labor productivity is particularly low. We take a macroeconomic approach to analyze the role of agriculture in development. We construct a new database with systematic measures of inputs and...

Existing research on selection in insurance markets focuses on how adverse selection distorts prices and misallocates products across people. This ignores the distributional consequences of who pays the higher prices. In this paper, we show that the distributional incidence depends on the...

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 consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don't know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms....

This paper studies policy in a class of economies in which information about commonly-relevant fundamentals -- such as aggregate productivity and demand conditions -- is dispersed and can not be centralized by the government. In these economies, the decentralized use of information can fail to...