Monetary policy and heterogeneous expectations

This paper studies the implications for monetary policy of heterogeneous expectations in a New Keynesian model. The assumption of rational expectations is replaced with parsimonious forecasting models where agents select between predictors that are underparameterized. In a Misspecification Equilibrium agents only select the best-performing statistical models. We demonstrate that, even when monetary policy rules satisfy the Taylor principle by adjusting nominal interest rates more than one for one with inflation, there may exist equilibria with Intrinsic Heterogeneity. Under certain conditions, there may exist multiple misspecification equilibria. We show that these findings have important implications for business cycle dynamics and for the design of monetary policy.     

Complementarity of Labor Market Institutions, Equilibrium Unemployment and the Propagation of Business Cycles

This paper evaluates complementarities of labor market institutions and the business cycle in the context of a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model economy. Matching between workers and vacancies with endogenous time spent in search, Nash-bargained wages, payroll taxation, and differential support for unemployed labor in search and leisure are central aspects of the model. For plausible regions of the policy and institutional parameter space, the model exhibits more persistence than standard real business cycle models and can exhibit indeterminacy of rational expectations paths without increasing returns in production. Furthermore, labor market institutions act in a complementary fashion in generating these effects.     

Unemployment and econometric learning

We apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen and Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From this perspective the assumption of rational expectations in the model could be seen as reasonable. But using a parametrisation with UK data, simulations show that the speed of convergence to the REE is slow. This type of learning dampens the cyclical response of unemployment to small structural shocks.     

Financial Market Imperfections, Labour Market Imperfections and Business Cycles

A Greenwald–Stiglitz (1993a) style rational expectations business cycle model is introduced in which uncorrelated productivity shocks or monetary shocks generate autocorrelated employment fluctuations due to financial constraints. The propagation mechanism is carefully modelled: because of capital market imperfections (only standard debt contracts are traded), firms' labour demand changes in response to changes in their balance-sheet position; because of labour market imperfections (efficiency wages), employment and unemployment fluctuate in response to shifts in labour demand. The virtue of the model is its simplicity. Despite the fact that unemployment is endogenous, the dynamic behaviour of the model under rational expectations can be characterised analytically.
JEL classification : E 32     

Beauty contest,bounded rationality,and sentiment pricing dynamics

We present a dynamic asset pricing model that incorporates investor sentiment, bounded rationality and higher-order expectations to study how these factors affect asset pricing equilibrium. In the model, we utilize a two-period trading market and investors make decisions based on the heterogeneous expectations principle and the “sparsity-based bounded rational” sentiment. We find that bounded rationality results in mispricing and reduces it in next period. Investor sentiment produces more significant effects than private signals, optimistic investor sentiment increases hedging demand, thus causing prices to soar. Higher-order investors are more rational and attentive to the strategies of other participants rather than private signals. This model also derives the dampening effect of higher-order expectations to price volatility and the heterogeneity expectation depicts inconsistent investor behavior in financial markets. In the model, investors' expectations about future price is distorted by their sentiment and bounded rationality, so they obtain a biased mean from the signal extraction.     

Learning,parameter variability,and swings in US macroeconomic dynamics

Recent studies show that the estimated parameters of rational expectations dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models of the business cycle are largely time-varying. This paper shows that assuming adaptive learning (rather than rational expectations) strongly reduces the estimated parameter variability of standard models (by around 75%). Moreover, the reduction in parameter variability induced by adaptive learning is much stronger for the subsets of parameters that control nominal price and wage rigidity and the subset of policy rule parameters (at 98% and 83%, respectively). Furthermore, our estimation results suggest that adaptive learning helps to explain the recent swings in the comovements between real and nominal US macroeconomic variables, but the swing in the relative weight of supply and demand shocks seems to be the most important driving force.     

Heterogeneous expectations,indeterminacy, and postwar US business cycles

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model extended to include heterogeneous expectations: consumers and firms form either rational or boundedly-rational expectations. The inclusion of heterogeneous expectations alters the determinacy properties of the model, with the details of expectations potentially becoming more influential than the Taylor principle for equilibrium stability.The model is estimated with Bayesian techniques, using rolling windows and allowing the parameters to fall both in the determinacy and indeterminacy regions. The estimates reveal large shares of agents who depart from rational expectations. Heterogeneous expectations are decisively preferred by the data everywhere in the sample.Finally, the paper revisits the narrative that sees postwar US macroeconomic data as consistent with indeterminacy in the pre-1979 sample, with a switch to determinacy starting in the early 1980s, and it shows that it is overall robust to inclusion of heterogeneous expectations.     

A note on the stability of endogenous cycles in Diamond's model of search and barter

In this note stability conditions for the endogenous rational expectations business cycles detected by Diamond and Fudenberg (1989) are derived. It is shown that for the trading externality underlying their example, bifurcating cycles are always stable, i.e., there always exists a continuum of rational expectations equilibrium paths converging to the cycle.I am grateful to Reiner Franke and the referees of this Journal for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank my colleagues Wolfgang Hofmann and Bill Brunton for checking the language of the paper.     

Activist Macroeconomic Policy, Election Effects and the Formation of Expectations: Evidence from OECD Economies

We examine the explanatory power of a political—business cycle theory in which governments practice short-run policy to lessen the impact of exogenous shocks. Governments have ideological objectives with respect to macroeconomic performance, but are constrained by an augmented Phillips curve. The most prominent version, the rational partisan model, incorporates forward-looking expectations. This model can be compared to a competing model based on backward-looking expectations. Alesina and Roubini's recent advocacy of the rational model uses OECD data. Our reconsideration of the same data, updated to 1995, suggests that the adaptive expectations version offers a better explanation than the rational one.     

Wealth inequality and employment fluctuations

This paper is concerned with the business cycle dynamics in search and matching models of the labor market when agents are ex-post heterogeneous. We focus on heterogeneity caused by different labor market histories and the resulting wealth inequality they generate. We show that this inequality implies wage rigidity relative to a complete insurance economy. The fraction of wealth poor agents prevents real wages from falling too much in recessions, since small decreases in income imply large losses in utility. Analogously, wages rise less during expansions than in models with homogeneous workers as small increases are enough for poor workers to accept job offers. This mechanism reduces the volatility of wages but generates more volatile employment levels.     

Heterogeneous expectations and the distribution of wealth

This study examines the extent to which heterogeneity of expectations affects wealth distribution, through the use of a standard heterogeneous agent model with uninsured idiosyncratic risk and aggregate uncertainty. A simple stylized model of heterogeneous expectations is considered to demonstrate that the impact of expectations’ heterogeneity on wealth inequality depends nonlinearly on the level and persistence of expectations’ dispersion. It is also shown that the heterogeneity of expectations generated by the empirically validated learning-from-experience model (Malmendier, Nagel, Q J Econ 2016) has a moderate but ambiguous impact on the distribution of wealth. The effect is sensitive to the calibration of the macroeconomic and learning parts of the model.     

新商业模式的二元性:合法性与异质性

商业模式的成型和成功,依赖于商业模式的二元性,即合法性与异质性。基于3721网络实名商业模式的案例分析发现,商业模式内外部合法性是商业模式现实成型的基础,而商业模式在竞争中取胜则需要焦点企业创建和维持商业模式的异质性。新商业模式功能的实现需要大量利益相关者共同努力,而在此过程中,作为一个新知识体系的商业模式,存在被竞争对手学习、模仿的可能,这必将削弱新商业模式的异质性。但是,基于商业模式的活动元理论,活动元的设计与配置是新商业模式二元性的决定因素。     

An Austrian view of expectations and business cycles

Austrian economists have contributed several important concepts to business cycle theory including: inter-temporal coordination of production and consumption, heterogeneous specificity of capital, non-neutrality of money, and the capital structure of production. Noticeably lacking, however, is a clear theory of expectations. Recent Austrian responses to rational expectations critiques—such as positing a prisoner’s dilemma, heterogeneous entrepreneurs, and adverse selection—try to fill this gap. But much work remains to be done developing an Austrian theory of expectations, one where they are endogenous to the market process and market institutions. This paper explores how people adapt their expectations to changing market phenomena based upon their perceived costs and benefits of doing so. It then applies endogenous expectations to the 2008 financial crisis.     

Can learning explain boom-bust cycles in asset prices? An application to the US housing boom

This paper argues that boom-bust behavior in asset prices can be explained by a model in which boundedly rational agents learn the process for prices. The novel feature of the model is that learning operates in both the demand for assets and the supply of credit. Interactions between agents on either side of the market create complementarities in their respective beliefs, yielding strong internal propagation. The model is applied to US housing markets. Quantitative exercises explain the recent boom-bust in US house prices from observed fundamentals whilst replicating key moments of housing market variables at business cycle frequencies.     

Monetary Disequilibrium, Endogenous Money, Stability and the Determinacy of Inflation

This paper examines the stability of the disequilibrium money model, with endogenous money and transitory interest rate control by the Central Bank. In the tradition of the post-Keynesian literature, the money supply is determined by bank lending and disequilibrium between money demand and supply determines the business cycle. The rate of interest is assumed to react to an inflation target and inflation responds to the business cycle. The paper examines the stability of the model under three inflation response systems: the accelerationist model, adaptive expectations and rational expectations.
(J.E.L.: E3, E4, E5).     

Non-falsified Expectations and General Equilibrium Asset Pricing: The Power of the Peso

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event which happens not to materialise over the sample period, but which is not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities – the peso problem –, can affect the behaviour of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To that end we describe quantitatively the macroeconomic and financial properties of a standard equilibrium business cycle model modified to allow for a very small probability of a depression state. We produce a model specification for which both business cycle characteristics and mean financial returns are in accord with United States observations.This paper examines the possibility that the large equity premium observed in the United States may result from the expectations of a disaster event, or set of events, which happen not to have materialised in the sample period of observations. Such a possibility, which falls under the rubric of a peso phenomenon, is supported by recent empirical work of Goetzman and Jorion (1997). Using return data for a wide range of countries, these authors conclude that the high historical premium in the United States is unique, and they conjecture that it may be attributable to the fact that disastrous events affecting other financial markets (e.g. WWII for Japan, Germany, and other European countries) have largely bypassed the American economy.     

Rationalizing the Political Business Cycle: A Workhorse Model

An incumbent policymaker has incentives to expand the money supply prior to elections to stimulate the economy and thereby further her chances of re-election. In its original formulation, the Nordhaus political business cycle hypothesis relies on adaptive inflation expectations and naive retrospective voting.
This article develops a simple model of a political cycle in inflation and output growth, assuming rational inflation expectations and rational retrospective voting. Voter scrutiny of the incumbent's economic performance has policy and selection effects, with ambiguous consequences for welfare: the policymaker manipulates the money supply for electoral purposes, but an incumbent of above average quality is more likely to remain in office.     

International finance in general equilibrium

Our purpose in this paper is to unify international trade and finance in a single general equilibrium model. Our model is rich enough to include multiple commodities (including traded and nontraded goods), heterogeneous consumers in each country, multiple time periods, multiple credit markets, and multiple currencies. Yet our model is simple enough to be effectively computable. We explicitly calculate the financial and real effects of changes in tariffs, productivity, and preferences, as well as the effects of monetary and fiscal policy.We maintain agent optimization, rational expectations, and market clearing (i.e. perfect competition with flexible prices) throughout. But because of the important role money plays, and because of the heterogeneity of markets and agents, we find that fiscal and monetary policy both have real effects. The effects of policy on real income, long-term interest rates, and exchange rates are qualitatively identical to those suggested in Mundell-Fleming (without the small country hypothesis), although our equilibrating mechanisms are different. However, because the Mundell-Fleming model ignores expectations and relative price changes, our model predicts different effects on the flow of capital, the balance of trade, and real exchange rates in some circumstances.     

Learning stability in economies with heterogeneous agents

An economy exhibits structural heterogeneity when the forecasts of different agents have different effects on the determination of aggregate variables. We study the important case of economies in which agents' behavior depends on forecasts of aggregate variables and show how different forms of heterogeneity in structure, forecasts, and adaptive learning rules affect the conditions for convergence of adaptive learning towards rational expectations equilibrium. Results are applied to an overlapping generations model and a New Keynesian model of monetary policy.