What are the implications of rational inattention for the effects of public information on individual behavior and in turn welfare? I examine the impact of rational inattention to public information in the "beauty contest" model of Morris and Shin (2002). I show that with information processing...

In contrary to previous literature, we show in the Grossman-Stiglitz model of noisy rational expectation that the social value of asymmetric information can be improved with more informative prices when being informed is uncertain. Investors always benefit from a privately payoff-relevant...

When there is strategic complementarity and all agents have access to public information, but only a subset of them has access to private information, strategic complementarity within the subset of privately-informed agents enhances the focal power of public information. This results to an...

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...

Previous scholarly work found that increasing public signals’ precision may reduce welfare in beauty-contest settings. In contrast, I find that when only some agents have private signals, the focal power of public signals is enhanced, such that expected social welfare is increasing in the...