Search Results
Economics of Love: Rejection Worth Chance at Dream Date
With the advance of social networks and increasing prevalence of online dating, the question of how men and women match up has gained importance in economics and society.
Working Paper
The rigidity of labor: processing savings and work decisions through Shannon's channels
This paper argues that constraining people to choose consumption and labor under finite Shannon capacity produces results in line with U.S. business cycle data. My model has a simple partial equilibrium setting in which risk averse consumers keep high labor supply and low consumption profile at early stage of life to hedge against wealth fluctuations. They rationally choose to keep consumption and labor unchanged until they collect enough information. I find that at high frequency consumption appears to be more sluggish than labor supply. However, when people decide to change consumption they ...
Working Paper
Marriage Market Sorting in the U.S.
We examine shifts in the U.S. marriage market, assessing how online dating, demographic changes and evolving societal norms influence mate choice and broader sorting trends. Using a targeted search model, we analyze mate selection based on factors such as education, age, race, income and skill. Intriguingly, despite the rise of online dating, preferences, mate choice and overall sorting patterns showed negligible change from 2008 to 2021. However, a longer historical view from 1960 to 2020 reveals a trend toward preferences for similarity, particularly concerning income, education and skills. ...
Journal Article
Central bank communication must overcome the public’s limited attention span
It is critical that central bankers have the ability to communicate their monetary policy goals and intentions involving employment and price stability to the public. The task is complicated in an economy that includes many firms and households in an era of information overload.
Journal Article
Survey-based forecasts identify likely inflation outcomes
Professional forecasters generally better predict inflation than household surveys and often outperform nave year-ahead forecasts based on the Fed?s 2 percent target. Constants, the basis of the nave forecasts, benefit because they are not subject to month-to-month volatility.
Working Paper
The rigidity of choice: Lifecycle savings with information-processing limits
This paper studies the implications of information-processing limits on the consumption and savings behavior of households through time. It presents a dynamic model in which consumers rationally choose the size and scope of the information they want to process concerning their financial possibilities, constrained by a Shannon channel. The model predicts that people with higher degrees of risk aversion rationally choose more information. This happens for precautionary reasons since, with finite processing rate, risk averse consumers prefer to be well informed about their financial ...
Working Paper
A theory of targeted search
We present a theory of targeted search, where people with a finite information processing capacity search for a match. Our theory explicitly accounts for both the quantity and the quality of matches. It delivers a unique equilibrium that resides in between the random matching and the directed search outcomes. The equilibrium that emerges from this middle ground is inefficient relative to the constrained Pareto allocation. Our theory encompasses the outcomes of the random matching and the directed search literature as limiting cases.
Working Paper
Targeted Search in Matching Markets
We propose a parsimonious matching model where a person's choice of whom to meet endogenizes the degree of randomness in matching. The analysis highlights the interaction between a productive motive, driven by the surplus attainable in a match, and a strategic motive, driven by reciprocity of interest of potential matches. We find that the interaction between these two motives differs with preferences?vertical versus horizontal?and that this interaction implies that preferences recovered using our model can look markedly different from those recovered using a model where the degree of ...
Marrying for Money Ends Up Reducing Income Inequality
The marriage market constitutes a way to ameliorate income inequality in the U.S. and to create bridges across the income ladder.
Calibrating central bank inflation messages is key to policy success
A well-crafted message about the current and future state of the economy can influence the private sector’s expectations and guide behavior to ensure that the economy remains strong and prices stable even amid threatening supply-and-demand shocks.