This paper examines the use of social capital in the venture creation process. We compare solo entrepreneurs (n=182) and new venture teams (n=274) from a random sample of start-ups in innovative industries and test social capital use and its effects on firm performance. Our results reveal that...

We derive the optimal monetary policy in a sticky price model when private agents follow adaptive learning. We show that this slight departure from rationality has important implications for policy design. The central bank faces a new intertemporal trade-off, not present under rational...

We use nine waves of BHPS data to examine interactions between spouses in terms of a behaviour with important health repercussions: cigarette smoking. Correlation between partners' behaviours may be due to correlated effects, as a consequence of matching or information revealed by others'...

Two ubiquitous empirical regularities in pay distributions are that the variance of wages increases with experience, and innovations in wage residuals have a large, unpredictable component. The leading explanations for these patterns are that over time, either firms learn about worker...

We study the effects of overconfidence in a two-period investment-decision agency setting. Under common priors, agent risk aversion implies inefficiently low first-period investment. In our model, principal and agent disagree about the profitability of the investment decision conditional on a...

Most studies of optimal monetary policy under learning rely on optimality conditions derived for the case when agents have rational expectations. In this paper, we derive optimal monetary policy in an economy where the Central Bank knows, and makes active use of, the learning algorithm agents...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naïvely update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

This paper examines the learning dynamics of boundedly rational agents, who are asked to voluntarily contribute to a discrete public good. In an incomplete information setting, we discuss contribution games and subscription games, the latter including a money-back guarantee in case of provision...

Recent literature shows that learning in oligopoly games might in the long run result in the Cournot or in the Walras equilibrium. Which outcome is achieved seems to depend on the underlying learning dynamics. This paper analyzes the forces behind the learning mechanisms determining the long run...

We study firms' incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining asymmetric business cycles. When the economy has been in a boom in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with an optimistic belief,...