In an economy studied by Lucas and Stokey, tax rates inherit the serial correlation structure of government expenditures, belying Barro's earlier result that taxes should be a random walk for any stochastic process of government expenditures. To recover a version of Barro's random walk...

We study how a concern for robustness modifies a policy maker's incentive to experiment. A policy maker has a prior over two submodels of inflation-unemployment dynamics. One submodel implies an exploitable trade-off, the other does not. Bayes' law gives the policy maker an incentive to...

The standard theory of decision making under uncertainty advises the decision maker to form a statistical model linking outcomes to decisions and then to choose the optimal distribution of outcomes. This assumes that the decision maker trusts the model completely. But what should a decision...

The authors adapt modern control theoretic techniques based on robust control theory to economic modelling and decision making. The main motivation behind the proposed approach is that concern about model misspecification in economics leads to decision strategies that work over the set of nearby...

It has become increasingly clear that economies can fruitfully be viewed as networks, consisting of millions of nodes (households, firms, banks, etc.) connected by business, social, and legal relationships. These relationships shape many outcomes that economists often measure. Over the past few...

A representative consumer uses Bayes' law to learn about parameters of several models and to construct probabilities with which to perform ongoing model averaging. The arrival of signals induces the consumer to alter his posterior distribution over models and parameters. The consumer's...