When the economy is subject to recurrent structural shifts, the monetary authority cannot credibly commit to a systematic approach to policy, since consistency between promises and actions is not easily verifiable; moreover, since agents have incomplete knowledge of the surrounding environment,...

Under the assumption of bounded rationality, economic agents learn from their past mistaken predictions by combining new and old information to form new beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the policy-maker, by affecting private agents' learning process, determines the speed at...

We study an endowment economy with complete markets and heterogeneous agents who do not have rational expectations, but form their beliefs using adaptive learning algorithms that may differ from one individual to another. We show that market completeness allows agents to smooth consumption...

In this paper we show that long-run expectations about future housing prices of both households and, especially, financial intermediaries had a large impact on households' indebtedness during the recent boom in U.S. housing prices. We introduce the theory of natural expectations in a...

We investigate the role of information spillovers (IS) in determining firms' labor adjustments. We test the proposition that information on relevant state variables spills over through one firm's decision th those of other firms, assuming that spillovers matter only among frims that are both...

We study firms� incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining business cycles. We find that when the economy has been in a recession in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with a...

We introduce a two-country no-arbitrage term-structure model to analyse the joint dynamics of bond yields, macroeconomic variables, and the exchange rate. The model allows to understand how exogenous shocks to the exchange rate affect the yield curves, how bond yields co-move in different...

This paper extends some theoretical results of Morris and Shin (1998) concerning the role of uncertainty about fundamentals in currency crises and tests their empirical relevance using a novel approach based on the distribution of survey expectations. Econometric evidence from the Asian crisis...

This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...

The applied literature on adaptive learning has mostly focused on small, linear models, with homogenous expectations. In non-linear models heterogeneous expectations prevail and the process through which agents select (and change) a forecasting model becomes a necessary ingredient of the...