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Working Paper
Signaling Effects of Monetary Policy
We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the policy rate signals the central bank?s view about macroeconomic developments to price setters. The model is estimated with likelihood methods on a U.S. data set that includes the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price setters? inflation expectations. This model improves upon existing perfect information models in explaining why, in the data, inflation expectations respond with delays to monetary impulses and remain disanchored for years. In the 1970s, U.S. monetary policy is found to signal persistent inflationary ...
Working Paper
Household Beliefs about Fiscal Dominance
We study beliefs about fiscal dominance using a survey of German households. We first design and conduct a randomized controlled trial to identify how fiscal news impacts individuals’ debt-to-GDP and inflation expectations. We document that the link between debt and inflation crucially depends on individuals’ views about the fiscal space. News leading individuals to expect a higher debt-to-GDP ratio makes them more likely to revise their inflation expectations upward. These average effects are driven by individuals who think that fiscal resources are stretched. By contrast, individuals ...
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Fundamental Disagreement about Monetary Policy and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
Using a unique data set of individual professional forecasts, we document disagreement about the future path of monetary policy, particularly at longer horizons. The stark differences in short rate forecasts imply strong disagreement about the risk-return trade-off of longer-term bonds. Longer-horizon short rate disagreement co-moves with term premiums. We estimate an affine term structure model in which investors hold heterogeneous beliefs about the long-run level of rates. Our model fits Treasury yields and the short rate paths predicted by different groups of investors and thus matches the ...
Working Paper
Leveraging the Disagreement on Climate Change: Theory and Evidence
We theoretically and empirically investigate how climate risks affect collateralized debt markets. First, we develop a debt model where agents have different beliefs over a long-run risk. In contrast with existing two-period competitive-equilibrium models, our infinite-horizon competitive-search model predicts more pessimistic agents are more likely to make leveraged investments on risky collateral assets. They also tend to use longer maturity debt contracts, which are more exposed to the long-run risk. Second, employing large data on real estate and mortgage transactions, combined with high ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Housing Demand Shocks
Housing demand shocks in standard macroeconomic models are a primary source of house price fluctuations, but those models have difficulties in generating the observed large volatility of house prices relative to rents. We provide a microeconomic foundation for the reduced-form housing demand shocks with a tractable heterogenous-agent framework. In our model with heterogeneous beliefs, an expansion of credit supply raises housing demand of optimistic buyers and boosts house prices without affecting rents. A credit supply shock also leads to a positive correlation between house trading volumes ...
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Disagreement and learning in a dynamic contracting model
We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and the agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment to states that the agent considers relatively more likely, a shift that changes incentives. In our dynamic setting, the interaction between incentive provision and learning creates an intertemporal source of ?disagreement risk? that alters optimal risk sharing. An endogenous regime shift between ...
Working Paper
Inflation Disagreement Weakens the Power of Monetary Policy
Household inflation disagreement weakens the impact of forward guidance and monetary policy shocks, especially when inflation forecasts are positively skewed. This attenuation effect is not driven by endogenous responses of inflation disagreement to contemporaneous shocks. A model with heterogeneous beliefs about the central bank’s inflation target explains these observations. Agents expecting higher future inflation perceive lower real interest rates and borrow more, constrained by borrowing limits. Increased inflation disagreement results in more borrowing-constrained agents, leading to ...
Working Paper
Incomplete Information and Irreversible Investment
How do information frictions and investment frictions interact? We use a continuous-time model to analytically characterize how incomplete information distorts firms’ decision rules and stationary distribution when investment is irreversible. The two frictions interact in rich and substantial ways. At the firm level, noisier information shrinks a firm’s inaction region and reduces the elasticity of investment to productivity. In the aggregate, incomplete information increases steady-state capital, exacerbates capital misallocation, and mitigates the impact of productivity shocks on ...
Working Paper
Implications of heterogeneity in preferences, beliefs and asset trading technologies for the macroeconomy
This paper analyzes and computes the equilibria of economies with large numbers of heterogeneous agents who have different asset trading technologies, preferences, and beliefs. We illustrate the value of our method by using it to evaluate the implications of these heterogeneities through several quantitative exercises.