A central difficulty in economics is to create a model with both good business cycle properties and asset pricing properties. I show how to solve this difficulty by a simple portable modeling device: the "disasterization" of models. Take an economy with good business cycle properties and create...

The distribution of city populations has attracted much attention, in part because it constrains models of local growth. However, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on "legal" rather than "economic" definitions for medium and...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-level shocks. Fundamental volatility...

The directed cognition model assumes that agents use partially myopic option-value calculations to select their next cognitive operation. The current paper tests this model by studying information acquisition in two experiments. In the first experiment, information acquisition has an explicit...