Suppose that the government was to announce that the economy will be booming in six months and that this announcement is based on false data. What effect would such an announcement have on future aggregate activity? This paper employs revisions of the series of leading economic indicators to...

A familiar result in the economic theory of the family is Becker's rotten-kid theorem. This theorem states that altruism by a family member will lead other selfish members to act efficiently from the family viewpoint. The authors extend Becker's one-period model to two periods and show that...

This paper considers the implications of heterogeneity in information-processing abilities for macroeconomic models that exhibit "strategic complements." The latter is the same concept that has received much attention in the recent macro literature under the headings "Keynesian coordination...

We show that a framework that integrates job assignment, human-capital acquisition, and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms, including the following. First, real-wage decreases are not rare but demotions are. Second, wage increases are...