Search Results
Working Paper
Time Use and the Efficiency of Heterogeneous Markups
What are the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity across firms? In standard monopolistic competition models, such heterogeneity implies inefficiency even in the presence of free entry. We enrich the standard model with heterogeneous firms so that preferences are non-separable in off-market time and market consumption and show that this changes the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity. In this context, homogeneity of markups is neither necessary nor sufficient for efficiency. The marginal cost of the marginal firm is weakly inefficiently high when off-market time and market ...
Working Paper
News Selection and Household Inflation Expectations
We examine how the media’s systematic selection of reporting topics influences household responses to inflation news. In a model where households learn about inflation from news coverage, households account for news selection when forming their expectations. Because media are more likely to report on inflation when it is high, the model implies an asymmetric response to news: high-inflation news changes expectations more than low-inflation news. We test this implication using household panel data, and find that exposure to higher-prices news increases inflation expectations by 0.4 ...