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Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
Leukhina, Oksana; Bloedel, Alex; Krishna, R. Vijay (2024-08-11)
We study the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. A principal insures an agent whose private type follows an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, it also backloads high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his reports increases without bound. These results extend—and help elucidate the limits of—the hallmark ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-020

Working Paper
Economic Uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Altig, David E.; Baker, Scott Brent; Barrero, Jose Maria; Bloom, Nick; Bunn, Philip; Chen, Scarlet; Davis, Steven J.; Meyer, Brent; Mihaylov, Emil; Mizen, Paul; Parker, Nicholas B.; Renault, Thomas; Smietanka, Pawel; Thwaites, Gregory (2020-07-10)
We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the United States and the UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business growth, and disagreement among professional forecasters about future gross domestic product growth. Three results emerge. First, all indicators show huge uncertainty jumps in reaction to the pandemic and its economic fallout. Indeed, most indicators reach their highest values on record. Second, peak ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2020-9

Working Paper
Understanding Uncertainty Shocks and the Role of Black Swans
Veldkamp, Laura (2022-12)
Economic uncertainty is a powerful force in the modern economy. Research shows that surges in uncertainty can trigger business cycles, bank runs and asset price fluctuations. But where do sudden surges in uncertainty come from? This paper provides a data-disciplined theory of belief formation that explains large fluctuations in uncertainty. It argues that people do not know the true distribution of macroeconomic outcomes. Like Bayesian econometricians, they estimate a distribution. Our main contribution is to explain why real-time estimation of distributions with non-normal tails results in ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2022-083

Working Paper
Asymmetric firm dynamics under rational inattention
Cheremukhin, Anton A.; Tutino, Antonella (2014-10-01)
We study the link between business failures, markups and business cycle asymmetry in the U.S. economy with a model of optimal firm exit under rational inattention. We show that the model's predictions of lagged, counter-cyclical and positively skewed markups together with counter-cyclical exit rates are consistent with the empirical evidence. Moreover, our model uncovers a new mechanism that links information processing with the business cycle. It predicts counter-cyclical attention to economic conditions consistent with survey evidence.
Working Papers , Paper 1411

Working Paper
Uncertainty and Growth Disasters
Jovanovic, Boyan; Ma, Sai (2020-05-07)
This paper documents several stylized facts on the real effects of economic uncertainty. First, higher uncertainty is associated with a more dispersed and negatively skewed distribution of output growth. Second, the response of economic growth to an increase in uncertainty is highly nonlinear and asymmetric. Third, higher asset volatility magnifies the negative impact of uncertainty on growth. We develop and estimate an analytically tractable model in which rapid adoption of new technology may raise economic uncertainty which causes measured productivity to decline. The equilibrium growth ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1279

Working Paper
Household Credit and Local Economic Uncertainty
Ramcharan, Rodney; DiMaggio, Marco; Kermani, Amir; Yu, Edison (2017-08-03)
This paper investigates the impact of uncertainty on consumer credit outcomes. We develop a local measure of economic uncertainty capturing county-level labor market shocks. We then exploit microeconomic data on mortgages and credit-card balances together with the crosssectional variation provided by our uncertainty measure to show strong borrower-specific heterogeneity in response to changes in uncertainty. Among high risk borrowers or areas with more high risk borrowers, increased uncertainty is associated with housing market illiquidity and a reduction in leverage. For low risk borrowers, ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-21

Journal Article
Risk Aversion at the Country Level
Hernandez-Murillo, Ruben; Gandelman, Nestor (2015)
This article estimates the coefficient of relative risk aversion for 75 countries using data on self-reports of personal well-being from the 2006 Gallup World Poll. The analysis suggests that the coefficient of relative risk aversion varies closely around 1, which corresponds to a logarithmic utility function. The authors conclude that their results support the use of the log utility function in numerical simulations of economic models.
Review , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , Pages 53-66

Working Paper
Inflation targeting and the anchoring of inflation expectations: cross-country evidence from consensus forecasts
Davis, J. Scott; Presno, Ignacio (2014-05-13)
Using survey data of inflation expectations across a 36 developed and developing countries, this paper examines whether the adoption of inflation targeting has helped to anchor inflation expectations. We examine the response of inflation expectations following a shock to inflation, inflation expectations, and oil prices. For the 13 countries that adopted inflation targeting midway through the time period used in this study, there is a significant difference in the responses between the earlier and the later subperiods. A shock leads to a positive, significant, and persistent increase ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 174

Working Paper
The Economic Effects of Trade Policy Uncertainty
Molligo, Patrick; Caldara, Dario; Prestipino, Andrea; Iacoviello, Matteo; Raffo, Andrea (2019-09)
We study the effects of unexpected changes in trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on the U.S. economy. We construct three measures of TPU based on newspaper coverage, firms' earnings conference calls, and aggregate data on tari rates. We document that increases in TPU reduce investment and activity using both firm-level and aggregate macroeconomic data. We interpret the empirical results through the lens of a two-country general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities and firms' export participation decisions. In the model as in the data, news and increased uncertainty about higher future ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1256

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