Search Results
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.
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.
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.
Journal Article
Inflation is not always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon
Fiscal policy is as significant as, and sometimes more important than, monetary policy in determining the price level and, therefore, the dynamics of inflation.
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.
Journal Article
Consumers Respond More to Negative News than Positive Info
Consumers, forced to navigate a constant stream of economic information, are often challenged to sort through details and respond to new material. Experiments suggest that people react more forcefully to negative income shocks than to positive ones. Size also matters: Reaction to small shocks is slower relative to the response to big shocks participation-rate decline.
Journal Article
Cost of decisionmaking influences individual selections
Market prices are often driven by choices later viewed as mistakes. Waves of optimism or pessimism sometimes dramatically move prices; a burst bubble of euphoria can bring significant macroeconomic consequences. ; A sudden change of sentiment may occur when a large number of stock market professionals consistently err by holding on to stocks for too long when they should sell, or by selling equities too quickly when they should be holding on to them. Yet, these individuals are specialists with every incentive to evaluate stocks correctly. ; Behavioral experiments show that in laboratory ...
Journal Article
'Rational inattention' guides overloaded brains, helps economists understand market behavior
Between Internet news sources, social media and email, people are awash in information, most of it accessible at near-zero cost. Yet, humans possess only a finite capacity to process all of it. The average email user, for example, receives dozens of messages per day. The messages can?t all receive equal attention. How carefully does someone read an email from a sibling or friend before crafting a reply? How closely does a person read an email from the boss?> ; Limitations on the ability to process information force people to make choices regarding the subjects to which they pay more or less ...
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.