It is now a few years since the introduction of the common currency, and Europe is still experiencing high unemployment. The conventional logic attributes this problem to strong trade unions and other flaws in the labour market. This article takes a different approach. Using a game theoretic...

This paper studies how people make inference about a state of the world when the information structure includes additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning about effort from observed performance may require accounting for the otherwise irrelevant role of luck. This creates an...

We report the results of an experimental analysis of monetary policy decision-making under uncertainty. We used a large sample of economically literate undergraduate and postgraduate students from the London School of Economics to play a simple monetary policy game, both as individuals and in...

The purpose of this paper is to make a quantitative contribution to the inflation versus price level targeting debate. It considers a policy-maker that can set policy either through an inflation targeting rule or a price level targeting rule to minimize a quadratic loss function using the actual...

This paper studies the design of optimal time-consistent monetary policy in an economy where the planner trusts its own model, while a representative household uses a set of alternative probability distributions governing the evolution of the exogenous state of the economy. In such environments,...

Several recent papers are devoted to the examination of the central banker's behaviour in an uncertain economic environment. This paper proposes, from a central banker's point of view, a synthesis of the main sources of uncertainty as well as an illustration of their effects within an analytical...

We argue that the uncertainty over the impact of macroprudential policy need not make a policymaker more cautious. Our starting point is the classic result of Brainard (1967) which finds that uncertainty over the impact of a policy instrument will make a policymaker less active. This result is...

We propose a novel framework for the economic assessment of climate-change policy. Our main point of departure from existing work is the adoption of a "satisficing", as opposed to optimizing, modeling approach. Along these lines, we place primary emphasis on the extent to which different...

This paper analyzes the behavior of a central bank under strong (quot;Knightianquot;) uncertainty when the short run trade-off between output and inflation is represented by the Sticky Information Phillips Curve proposed by Mankiw and Reis (2002). By solving the robust control problem...

Experiments typically rely on small payments to incentivize participants. This works if participants view these payments as fungible with their own money, but if participants view the payments as a windfall, they may behave differently in experiments than in real life. We modify standard risky...