Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants’ expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents’ learning and the dynamics of the...

This paper analyzes how the formation of expectations constrains monetary and fiscal policy design. Economic agents have imperfect knowledge about the economic environment and the policy regime in place. Households and firms learn about the policy regime using historical data. Regime uncertainty...

The recent nonexperimental literature on social learning focuses on showing that observational learning exists, that is, individuals do indeed draw inferences by observing the actions of others. We take this literature a step further by analyzing whether individuals are Bayesian social learners....

Under rational expectations, monetary policy is generally highly effective in stabilizing the economy. Aggregate demand management operates through the expectations hypothesis of the term structure: Anticipated movements in future short-term interest rates control current demand. This paper...

Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the United States have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps - specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs - as a potential explanation for these...

Using the panel component of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we show that individuals, in particular women and ethnic minorities, are highly heterogeneous in their expectations of inflation. We estimate a model of inflation expectations based on learning from experience that also allows for...

This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. The theory is similar in spirit to, but distinct from, unpleasant monetarist arithmetic and the fiscal theory of the price level. Because the assumption of imperfect knowledge breaks...

Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the United States have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps — specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs — as a potential explanation for these...

We provide a preference-based rationale for endogenous overconfidence. Horizon-dependent risk aversion, combined with a possibility to forget, can generate overconfidence and excessive risk taking in equilibrium. An "anxiety prone" agent, who is more risk-averse to imminent than to distant...

We study the term structure of disagreement of professional forecasters for key macroeconomic variables. We document a novel set of facts: 1) forecasters disagree at all horizons, including the very long run; 2) the shape of the term structure of disagreement differs markedly across variables:...