We argue that when fiscal policy is endogenously determined, the incentives of redistributive politics associated with its formulation can endogenously add to the uncertainty and volatility that an economy faces. In particular, small shocks may get translated into large fluctuations. Our...

We examine the roles and values of honesty and advocacy in communication by studying two closely-related variants of the standard cheap-talk game. In the honesty model, the sender is behavioral and honestly reveals the state with a positive probability. In the advocacy model, the sender is...

We study and compare the behavioral consequences of honesty and white lie in communication. An honest agent always recommends the ex post optimal policy to the principal, while a white liar may manipulate information but only for the sake of the principal. We identify the effects of honesty and...

We study the problem of efficient auction design in environments with interdependent values, under arbitrary common knowledge assumptions. We propose a simple mechanism and show that, under a rather mild condition, it "robustly" achieves efficiency. Our mechanism consists in a standard Vickrey...

This paper develops and implements a new approach for separately identifying preference and opportunity parameters of a two-sided search and matching model in the absence of data on choice sets. This approach exploits information on the dynamics of matches: how long it takes for singles to form...

In finite samples, the use of a slightly endogenous but highly relevant instrument can reduce mean-squared error (MSE). Building on this observation, I propose a moment selection criterion for GMM in which moment conditions are chosen based on the MSE of their associated estimators rather than...

We propose point forecast accuracy measures based directly on distance of the forecast-error c.d.f. from the unit step function at 0 (\stochastic error distance," or SED). We provide a precise characterization of the relationship between SED and standard predictive loss functions, showing that...

We propose and solve a small-scale New-Keynesian model with Markov sunspot shocks that move the economy between a targeted-inflation regime and a deflation regime and fit it to data from the U.S. and Japan. For the U.S. we find that adverse demand shocks have moved the economy to the zero lower...

Though Mass Open Online Courses are very different from each other in their structure, content or audience, they are all characterized by low completion rates. In this paper, we use the Cox proportional hazard model to analyze student retention in the MOOC Principle of Microeconomics. Using two...