We explore the effect of interest rates on risk taking and find that it depends on the type of risk involved. In a Bayesian setting, investments can be risky either because payoff-relevant signals are noisy or because the dispersion of the prior is high. While both types of risk contribute...

We explore the intuitive idea that more information leads to greater dispersion of posterior beliefs about the expected state of the world. First, we show that two dispersion orders that have been widely used as informativeness criteria do not satisfy the desirable property of ordinality of...

This paper analyzes the dynamic interactions between the precision of information, technological development, and welfare within an overlapping generations model. More precise information about idiosyncratic production shocks has ambiguous effects on technological progress and welfare, which...

The paper constructs a theoretical framework in which the value of information in general equilibrium is determined by the interaction of two opposing mechanisms: first, more information about future random events leads to better individual decisions and, therefore, higher welfare. This is the...

We consider an OLG model with accumulation in human capital and analyze the economic implications of information about individual skills. Agents in each period differ by the random innate ability assigned to each individual. When young, all agents are screened for their abilities and this...