The evidence from many experiments suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward looking, decisions. This raises the question when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate...

Matching mechanisms have been proposed to improve public good provision in voluntary contributions. However, such decentralized subsidizing mechanisms may not be Pareto-improving and may suffer from incomplete information and incredible commitment. This paper examines participation constraints...

In the past decades financial markets rapidly gained on complexity due to an increased demand for risk diversification and hedging. A number of sophisticated instruments was developed that capture various aspects of price movements, correlations of assets, macro-economic developments, and other...

We provide new insight on international monetary policy cooperation using a two-country model based on Benigno and Benigno (2006). Assuming symmetry, save for the volatility of (markup) shocks, we show that an incentive feasibility problem exists between the policymakers across national borders:...

Prediction markets — markets used to forecast future events — have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their...

While high fertility persists in the poorest countries and fertility declines with per capita income in developing countries, fertility and per capita income are now positively associated across most developed countries. This paper presents a model where a Ushaped relationship between overall...

Designing, modelling and analysing global emissions policies are becoming increasingly complex undertakings. Pressure on developing economies to make quantifiable emissions reduction commitments has led to the introduction of intensity based emissions targets, where reductions in emissions are...

Empirical questions such as whether the Phillips curve or the Okun’s law is stable can often be framed as a model comparison—e.g., comparing a vector autoregression (VAR) in which the coefficients in one equation are constant versus one that has time-varying parameters. We develop Bayesian...

We analyze how trust affects the transmission of negative demand and supply shocks. We define trust to have two dimensions: there is trust in the central bank’s inflation target and trust in the future of economic activity. We use a behavioural macroeconomic model that is characterized by the...

This paper evaluates how adaptive learning agents weight different pieces of information when forming expectations with a recursive least squares algorithm. The analysis is based on a renewed and more general non-recursive representation of the learning algorithm, namely, a penalized weighted...