Members of different social groups often hold widely divergent public beliefs regarding the nature of the world in which they live. We develop a model that can accommodate such public disagreement, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the...

This paper assesses the role of heating entitlements in generating stark air quality differences across China. During the 1950-1980 central planning period, the Chinese government established free winter heating of homes and offices as a basic right via the provision of free coal fuel for...

This paper considers instrumental variable regression with a single endogenous variable and the potential presence of weak instruments. I construct confidence sets for the coefficient on the single endogenous regressor by inverting tests robust to weak instruments. I suggest a numerically simple...

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of...

For an economy with altruistic parents facing productivity shocks, the optimal estate taxation is progressive: fortunate parents should face lower net returns on their inheritances. This progressivity reflects optimal mean reversion in consumption, which ensures that a long-run steady state...

This paper studies the efficiency gains from distorting savings in dynamic Mirrleesian private-information economies. We develop a method that pertubs the consumption process optimally, while preserving incentive compatibility. The Inverse Euler equation holds at the new optimized allocation....

This paper investigates how incomplete information impacts the response of prices to nominal shocks. Our baseline model is a variant of the Calvo model in which firms observe the underlying nominal shocks with noise. In this mode, the response of prices is pinned down by three parameters: the...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and - potentially - shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented by a scalar. Individuals meet pairwise and exchange...

The reply by Kehoe and Prescott restates their position but does not answer the criticism made in my review of their book (Temin 2008). I argued that the general equilibrium model of economic growth to study income fluctuations does not lead to a useful research program; the use of...