1,720,961 research outputs found
Macroeconomic Disagreement in Treasury Yields
Get PDFI estimate a term structure model of Treasury yields in which traders’ informa- tion about macroeconomic conditions is dispersed. Bond yields and inflation forecasts identify properties of traders’ information. I find that prices are moderately infor- mative about economic fundamentals, but more informative about policy and others’ beliefs. Nevertheless, beliefs about the macroeconomy are estimated to be quite het- erogeneous. Over the sample period, dispersed beliefs directly added an average of 60 basis points to ten year yields, mostly attribute to disagreement about the Federal Re- serve’s inflation target. Accounting for learning and belief heterogeneity dramatically reduces the magnitude and volatility of risk premia relative to estimates that assume full information
Essays on Information in Macroeconomics and Finance:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Ryan ChahrourExpectations formation is central to macroeconomics. Households, firms, and policymakers must form expectations not only about fundamentals, but about what other agents’ beliefs are, because others’ beliefs will determine their actions. The three essays in this dissertation examine empirically and theoretically how agents use both public and private information to form expectations. The first two essays combine a models of optimizing behavior and forecasting with data on the macroeconomy, financial prices, and macroeconomic forecasts to examine the extent to which economic agents learn about the macroeconomy from financial prices and monetary policy actions. The third essay examines theoretically how members of a committee use public and private information to form beliefs when they care both about having accurate forecasts and coordinating actions with others. All three essays emphasize that frictions in expectations formation are a salient feature of the world, and understanding the extent and importance of those frictions is important for both positive and normative questions in macroeconomics and finance. Beliefs about the future determine the willingness of financial market participants to save and invest, and theory suggests they should value more highly assets which are expected to pay higher returns during recessionary periods when consumption is otherwise low. Hence, financial prices reflect macroeconomic expectations. In the first essay, titled "Macroeconomic Disagreement in Treasury Yields," I explore how agents with idiosyncratic, private information form beliefs about both the macroeconomy and the beliefs of other agents. Using data on United States Treasury debt, the macroeconomy, and individual inflation forecasts, I estimate the precision of bond traders’ information about the macroeconomy and how much they disagree with each other. I allow for traders to learn both from private signals and from asset prices, which aggregate the beliefs of all the traders in the market. I find that bond prices are moderately informative about macroeconomic variables, but are the source of most of the information traders have about monetary policy and the beliefs of others. In contrast to studies which assume full information, risk premia are much less important than slow-adjusting interest rate expectations for explaining the behavior of long-run yields. The most important signal for bond traders appears to be the Federal Reserve’s short-run rate, which encodes information about the macroeconomy and the central bank’s intended future policy. Nevertheless, the fact that traders held disparate beliefs about the macroeconomy, and especially about the long-run inflation target of the Federal Reserve, elevated long-term yields on average. The first essay demonstrates empirically that financial market participants learn about the macroeconomy from monetary policy actions. However, it is silent on how monetary policymakers form beliefs about the macroeconomy, or how the information in monetary policy rates endogenously affects macroeconomic outcomes. In the second essay "Your Guess is as Good as Mine: Central Bank Information and Monetary Policy," I use data on private sector forecasts and forecasts from the Federal Reserve Board staff to examine the typical assumption of common information between firms and monetary policymakers. Using forecasts from a survey of professional forecasters and from the Federal Reserve Board staff, I show evidence against the typical assumption of common information between monetary policymakers and the private sector, and also that policymakers are, at best, only weakly better at forecasting than private forecasters. Based on this evidence, I augment an otherwise standard monetary policy model by relaxing the common information assumption. Instead, I assume there is idiosyncratic, private information among price-setting firms, and between firms and the central banker. Firms combine private information about aggregate conditions with the observed monetary policy rate to form expectations about fundamentals and the beliefs of rival firms. The central banker must form expectations about firms’ beliefs because those beliefs will determine inflation and overall economic activity. But as a result of their differences in information sets, firms must form expectations about other firms’ expectations, and what the central banks’ expectations of their expectations are. I examine the ability of this model to fit the data and find that the model can capture features of both firm and central bank inflation expectations, but in the absence of imperfect information among households, it is difficult to simultaneously match the forecast data and data on real activity. This result points to the sensitivity of models with dispersed information to the underlying assumptions about how central bankers will respond to exogenous shocks. The second chapter emphasized how the assumptions economists make regarding monetary policymakers’ information is critical for understanding their actions. Motivated by this example, my third chapter "Information Investment in a Coordination Game" explores theoretically how members of a committee who are uncertain about others’ beliefs decide on a binary action, and how their decision to pay close attention to public or private signals is related to their desire to accurately forecast versus coordinating their behavior with others. I show that when it is assumed that information decisions among committee members are symmetric - everyone pays the same amount of attention to the same things - there is a unique outcome of the coordination game. However, I further show that it is difficult to guarantee that committee members will all choose a symmetric allocation of information. Aside from the direct cost of acquiring better information, allocating attention to more accurate signals can harm welfare when coordination motives are dominant. In a set of numerical exercises, however, I show that it is possible for a unique equilibrium to exist, and that actions that do not have a large impact on the payoffs of committee members (such as changing the size of the committee) may nevertheless have large impacts on the accuracy of the committee’s forecasts. This suggests a possible tension between the welfare of the committee, which benefits from consensus, and the welfare of those affected by the committee’s actions, which likely depends on whether the committee takes the objectively correct action. My dissertation has important implications for both academic economists and policymakers. Understanding the sources of business cycle fluctuations and the determinants of asset prices requires grappling with the fact that people have differences in beliefs. Empirical evidence suggests that agents’ beliefs are shaped by both idiosyncratic forces and by public announcements and policy decisions, and economists’ models need to reflect these features of the world. Policy, too, is affected by the information available to policymakers, and to understand how policymakers have acted in the past and should act in the future, it is necessary to take seriously the ways their belief formation deviates from the full information rational expectations benchmark
Knowledgeable Partisans and Inflation Expectations
Get PDFUsing a nationally representative survey from the 2024 United States presidential election, we investigate the role knowledge plays in the difference between inflation expectations of Republicans and Democrats. Unconditionally, Republicans\u27 average inflation forecast was nearly 3\% higher than Democrats; they also reported higher inflation in the past year (3.5\%) and higher expectations in the long run (2.0\%). Conditioning on their beliefs about the future and their long-run forecasts reduces the pure partisan gap in inflation forecasts by two thirds. The gap between Democrats and Republicans is largest for partisans who are the most knowledgeable about politics. Greater numeracy appears to exacerbate the partisan gap, while greater economic knowledge mitigates it. The differential role of partisan and economic knowledge are consistent with a model where respondents\u27 survey responses balance objective forecasts with affective motives
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Inflation Expectations and Political Polarization: Evidence from the Cooperative Election Study
Get PDFUsing a unique, nationally representative survey from the 2022 midterm elections, we investigate the partisan divide in beliefs about inflation and monetary policy. We find that party identity is predictive of inflation forecasts even after conditioning on beliefs about both past inflation and the Federal Reserve’s long-run inflation target. Partisan forecast differences are driven by respondents who express low generalized trust in others and have a high degree of political knowledge; high-trust and low- knowledge partisans make similar forecasts all else equal. This finding is consistent with the literature in political psychology that examines the endorsement of conspiracy theories and political misinformation. We argue that the partisan divide in consumer inflation surveys is consistent with strategic responses by partisans
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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