Inattentive Producers

I present and solve the problem of a producer who faces costs of acquiring, absorbing, and processing information. I establish a series of theoretical results describing the producer's behavior. First, I find the conditions under which she prefers to set a plan for the price she charges, or instead prefers to set a plan for the quantity she sells. Second, I show that the agent rationally chooses to be inattentive to news, only sporadically updating her information. I solve for the optimal length of inattentiveness and characterize its determinants. Third, I explicitly aggregate the behavior of many such producers. I apply these results to a model of inflation. I find that the model can fit the quantitative facts on post-war inflation remarkably well, that it is a good forecaster of future inflation, and that it survives the Lucas critique by fitting also the pre-war facts on inflation moderately well.

A Dynamic Measure of Inflation

This paper shows that conventional measures of cost-of-living inflation, based on static models of consumption, suffer from two problems. The first is an intertemporal substitution bias, as these measures neglect the ability of consumers to borrow and lend in response to price changes. The second problem is the omission of intertemporal prices, which capture relevant relative prices for a consumer who lives for many periods. The paper proposes a dynamic price index (DPI) that solves these problems. Theoretically, it shows that the DPI is forward-looking, responds by more to persistent shocks, includes assets prices, and distinguishes between durable and non-durable goods' prices. A constructed DPI for the United States from 1970 to 2008 differs markedly from the CPI, it is close to serially uncorrelated, it is mostly driven by the prices of houses and bonds, and is twice as high as the CPI in 2008.

The Time-Series Properties of Aggregate Consumption: Implications for the Costs of Fluctuation

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations, one statistical and one economic. The statistical approach estimates the properties of consumption and calculates the cost of having consumption fluctuating around its mean growth. The paper finds that the persistence of consumption is a crucial determinant of these costs and that the high persistence in the data severely distorts conventional measures. It shows how to compute valid estimates and confidence intervals. The economic approach uses a calibrated model of optimal consumption and measures the costs of eliminating income shocks. This uncovers a further cost of uncertainty, through its impact on precautionary savings and investment. The two approaches lead to costs of fluctuations that are higher than the common wisdom, between 0.5% and 5% of per capita consumption.

A Sticky-Information General Equilibrium Model for Policy Analysis

This paper presents a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with a single friction in all markets: sticky information. In this economy, agents are inattentive because of the high cost of acquiring, absorbing and processing information, so that the actions of consumers, workers and firms are slow to incorporate news. This paper presents the details of the behavior of an economy with pervasive inattentiveness functions, and develops a set of algorithms that solve the model quickly. It then applies these to estimate the model using post-1986 data for the United States and post-1993 for the Eurozone, and to conduct counterfactual policy experiments. The end result is a laboratory that is rich enough to account for the dynamics of at least five macroeconomic series (inflation, output, hours, interest rates, and wages), and which can be used to inform applied monetary policy.

Using VARs to Identify Models of Fiscal Policy: A Comment on Perotti

This note comments on Perotti’s (2008) estimates of the impact of a government spending shock on the economy. In the process, it makes two points. First, it notes that with enough freedom to pick the dynamics of policy variables, the neoclassical model can generate any set of observations for the non-policy variables. Second, it proposes a method to identify the policy dynamics in theoretical models by using the estimated impulse responses of the policy variables from VARs, and in this way generate testable predictions of the model for the non-policy variables.

The time-series properties of aggregate consumption: implications for the costs of fluctuations

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations, one statistical and one economic. The statistical approach estimates the properties of consumption and calculates the cost of having consumption fluctuating around its mean growth. The paper finds that the persistence of consumption is a crucial determinant of these costs and that the high persistence in the data severely distorts conventional measures. It shows how to compute valid estimates and confidence intervals. The economic approach uses a calibrated model of optimal consumption and measures the costs of eliminating income shocks. This uncovers a further cost of uncertainty, through its impact on precautionary savings and investment. The two approaches lead to costs of fluctuations that are higher than the common wisdom, between 0.5% and 5% of per capita consumption.Costs of fluctuations; Models of aggregate consumption; Consumption persistence

The Brevity and Violence of Contractions and Expansions

Early studies of business cycles argued that contractions in economic activity were briefer (shorter) and more violent (rapid) than expansions. This paper systematically investigates this claim and in the process discovers a robust new business cycle fact: expansions and contractions in output are equally brief and violent but contractions in employment are briefer and more violent than expansions. The difference arises because employment typically lags output around peaks but both series roughly coincide in their troughs. We discuss the performance of existing business cycle models in accounting for this fact, and conclude that none can fully account for it. We then show that a simple model that combines three familiar ingredients%u2013labor hoarding, a choice of when to scrap old technologies, and job training or job search%u2013can account for the business cycle fact.

A NOTE ON COMONOTONICITY AND POSITIVITY OF THE CONTROL COMPONENTS OF DECOUPLED QUADRATIC FBSDE

In this small note we are concerned with the solution of Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDE) with drivers that grow quadratically in the control component (quadratic growth FBSDE or qgFBSDE). The main theorem is a comparison result that allows comparing componentwise the signs of the control processes of two different qgFBSDE. As a byproduct one obtains conditions that allow establishing the positivity of the control process.Comment: accepted for publicatio

What measure of inflation should a central bank target?

This paper assumes that a central bank commits itself to maintaining an inflation target and then asks what measure of the inflation rate the central bank should use if it wants to maximize economic stability. The paper first formalizes this problem and examines its microeconomic foundations. It then shows how the weight of a sector in the stability price index depends on the sector's characteristics, including size, cyclical sensitivity, sluggishness of price adjustment, and magnitude of sectoral shocks. When a numerical illustration of the problem is calibrated to U.S. data, one tentative conclusion is that the central bank should use a price index that gives substantial weight to the level of nominal wages. JEL Classification: E42, E52, E58inflation targeting, monetary policy