The literature on belief-driven business cycles treats news and noise as distinct representations of agents' beliefs. We prove they are empirically the same. Our result lets us isolate the importance of purely belief-driven fluctuations. Using three prominent estimated models, we show that...

Agents have foresight when they receive information about a random process above and beyond the information contained in its current and past history. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic measure of the quantity of foresight in an information structure, and show how to separate...

This paper models the tradeoff, perceived by central banks and other public actors, between providing the public with useful information and the risk of overwhelming it with excessive communication. An information authority chooses how many signals to provide regarding an aggregate state and...

The SVAR and narrative approaches to estimating tax multipliers deliver significantly different results. The former yields multipliers of about 1 and the latter of about 3. The two approaches differ along two important dimensions: the identification scheme and the reduced-form transmission...

This paper presents a model in which some goods trade in "customer markets." In these markets, advertising plays a critical role in facilitating long-lived relationships. We estimate both policy and non-policy parameters of the model (which includes New-Keynesian frictions) on U.S. data,...

We find that variation in expected U.S. productivity explains over half of U.S. dollar/G7 exchange rate fluctuations. Both correctly-anticipated changes in productivity and expectational noise, which influences the expectation of productivity but not its eventual realization, have large effects....

We propose a model of endogenous, persistent coordination on the international medium of exchange. An asset becomes the dominant international medium because it is widely held, and remains widely held because it is dominant. The country issuing the dominant asset is a net debtor, but earns an...