Recursive utility models of the type introduced by Kreps and Porteus (1978) are used extensively in applied research in macroeconomics and asset pricing in environments with uncertainty. These models represent preferences as the solution to a nonlinear forward-looking difference equation with a...

The economics of global climate change is characterized by fundamental uncertainties, including the appropriate reduced forms for climate dynamics, the specification of economic damages resulting from climate change, and mechanisms by which these damages will affect long-run economic growth....

The past three decades have been characterized by vast change and crises in global financial markets—and not in politically unstable countries but in the heart of the developed world, from the Great Recession in the United States to the banking crises in Japan and the Eurozone. As we try to...

For a Markov decision problem in which unknown transition probabilities serve as hidden state variables, we study the quality of two approximations to the decision rule of a Bayesian who each period updates his subjective distribu- tion over the transition probabilities by Bayes' law. The first...

Friedman and Schwartz hypothesized that the Great Depression created ex- aggerated fears of economic instability. We quantify their idea by using a robustness calculation to shatter a representative consumer's initial confidence in the parameters of a two-state Markov chain that truly governs...

We estimate a Bayesian vector autoregression for the U.K. with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities. We use it to characterize posterior densities for several objects that are useful for designing and evaluating monetary policy, including local approximations to the mean,...

Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of...

Recent papers have analyzed how adaptive agents may converge to and escape from self-confirming equilibria. All of these papers have imputed to agents a particular prior about drifting coefficients. In the context of a model of monetary policy, this paper analyzes dynamics that govern both...