This paper compares the evolution of long-run inflation expectations in the euro area and the United States, using evidence from financial markets and surveys of professional forecasters. Survey data indicate that long-run inflation expectations are reasonably well anchored in both economies but...

Open market operations play a key role in allocating central bank funds to the banking system and thereby to steer short-term interest rates in line with the stance of monetary policy. Many central banks apply so-called “fixed rate tender” auctions in their open market operations. This note...

This paper proposes an equilibrium approach to belief manipulation and deception in which agents only have coarse knowledge of their opponent's strategy. Equilibrium requires the coarse knowledge available to agents to be correct, and the inferences and optimizations to be made on the basis of...

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...

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...

This paper analyzes the mechanisms underlying excessive sexual risk taking in the presence of HIV. Drawing ideas from psychology on decision-making processes and risk evaluation, a theoretical model interacting affect-induced myopia and cognitive dissonance is developed and analyzed. The results...

The paper considers optimal monetary stabilization policy in a forward-looking model, when the central bank recognizes that private sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possible in the case of any beliefs that are close...

The main objective of this paper is to present a reading of The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin in the context of the financial crisis, in particular, reflect from a few fragments of Benjamin's work appear to lie around a Black Swan. The recovery of the fragments of The Arcades seems...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation...

How many members should committees consist of? This paper addresses this question in view of imperfect information and coordination behavior among the members, which is a new approach alternative to introducing information acquisition cost. First, using a simple model, I show that the existence...