D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
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Expectations and Monetary Policy: Experimental Evidence
The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business-cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and the output gap by at least two-thirds. -
The Safety of Government Debt
We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships. -
The ‘Celtic Crisis’: Guarantees, Transparency and Systemic Liquidity Risk
Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and prevent bank runs. However, as the experiences of some European countries, most notably Ireland, have demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees are crucially intertwined with the sovereign’s funding risks. -
The Threat of Counterfeiting in Competitive Search Equilibrium
Recent studies in monetary theory show that if buyers can use lotteries to signal the quality of bank notes, counterfeiting does not occur in a pooling equilibrium. In this paper, I investigate the robustness of this non-existence result by considering an alternative trading mechanism. -
Are Sunspots Learnable? An Experimental Investigation in a Simple General-Equilibrium Model
We conduct experiments with human subjects in a model with a positive production externality in which productivity is a non-decreasing function of the average level of employment of other firms. -
A Tractable Monetary Model Under General Preferences
Consider the monetary model of Lagos and Wright (JPE 2005) but with general preferences and general production. I show that preferences satisfying UXXUHH – (UXH)2 = 0 is a sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of monetary equilibrium with degenerate money distribution. -
Money and Price Posting under Private Information
We study price posting with undirected search in a search-theoretic monetary model with divisible money and divisible goods. Ex ante homogeneous buyers experience match specific preference shocks in bilateral trades. The shocks follow a continuous distribution and the realization of the shocks is private information. -
Counterfeit Quality and Verification in a Monetary Exchange
Recent studies on counterfeiting in a monetary search framework show that counterfeiting does not occur in a monetary equilibrium. These findings are inconsistent with the observation that counterfeiting of bank notes has been a serious problem in some countries. -
Composition of International Capital Flows: A Survey
We survey several key mechanisms that explain the composition of international capital flows: foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment and debt flows (bank loans and bonds). In particular, we focus on the following market frictions: asymmetric information in capital markets and exposure to liquidity shocks.