We study information processing in a simple endowment economy where the mean consumption growth rate are governed by a hidden state variable and agents have recursive preferences. We show that for typical parameter values, there is a strong incentive to commit to ignoring future information on...

Using daily consumer survey data, we analyze the transmission of gas prices to consumer beliefs and expectations about the economy. We exploit the high frequency and geographic disaggregation of our dataset to facilitate identification. Consumer sentiment becomes more pessimistic with rising gas...

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

To predict the effects of the 2020 U.S. "CARES" act on consumption, we extend a model that matches responses of households to past consumption stimulus packages. The extension allows us to account for two novel features of the coronavirus crisis. First, during the lockdown, many types of...

Economic narratives are pervasive in the public discourse and can shape individual behavior. But so far we know very little about whether households actually demand and value narratives as information. We combine a comprehensive expert survey with a large-scale nationally representative...

Economic narratives are pervasive in the public discourse and can shape individual behavior. But so far we know very little about whether households actually demand and value narratives as information. We combine a comprehensive expert survey with a large-scale nationally representative...

This paper studies the response of household inflation expectations to television news coverage of inflation. We analyze news data from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC alongside a daily measure of inflation expectations. Using a local projection instrumental variables approach, we estimate the dynamic...

This paper studies the role of product availability in attracting consumer demand. We start with a newsvendor model, but additionally assume that stockouts are costly to consumers. The seller sets an observable price and an unobservable stocking quantity. Consumers anticipate the likelihood of...

This paper studies how people make inference about a state of the world when the information structure includes additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning about effort from observed performance may require accounting for the otherwise irrelevant role of luck. This creates an...