In recent years, central banks have increasingly turned to "forward guidance" as a central tool of monetary policy, especially as interest rates around the world have hit the zero lower bound. Standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance is extremely powerful: promises about...

Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questions to ask. We model these situations...

We show that a parsimoniously calibrated search-and-matching model of the labor market with on-the-job search gives a good account of the cyclical variation in idiosyncratic wage risk among those experiencing unemployment and of the composition effect over the business cycle. As these components...

Every developed country has automatic rules in its tax-and-transfer system that are, at least partly, intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. While there is great dispute on whether discretionary fiscal policy can be used as a countercyclical policy, there is wide agreement that these...

We apply the rational inattention approach to information frictions to a discrete choice problem. The rationally inattentive agent chooses how to process information about the unknown values of the available options to maximize the expected value of the chosen option less an information cost. We...

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures how effective they are. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete-markets model of consumption and inequality with the new...

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures how effective they are. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete-markets model of consumption and inequality with the new...

Individuals must often choose among discrete alternatives with imperfect informa- tion about their values. Before choosing, they may have an opportunity to study the options, but doing so is costly. This costly information acquisition creates new choices such as the number of and types of...

I develop a general equilibrium model of saving behavior in which the quality of nancial decisions is endogenously determined by the incentives to exert effort in learning about financial opportunities. The model generates predictions for asset holdings, asset market participation and returns...