What are the effects of beliefs, sentiment, and uncertainty, over the business cycle? To answer this question, we develop a behavioral New Keynesian macroeconomic model, in which we relax the assumption of rational expectations. Agents are, instead, boundedly rational: they have a...

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical German data. Firms' forecasts improve with age. We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms in the East are treated with ignorance about the distribution...

A number of studies have found that news shocks account for a large part of the aggregate fl uctuations of the main macroeconomic variables.We show that when taking rational expectations into consideration there is a limit on the size of the variance of the news shocks,which has not been...