This paper develops a simple two-country, two-good model of international trade and borrowing that suppresses all previous sources of current account dynamics. Under rational expectations, international debt follows a random walk. Under adaptive learning however, international debt behaves like...

This paper addresses the output-price volatility puzzle by studying the interaction of optimal monetary policy and agents' beliefs. We assume that agents choose their information acquisition rate by minimizing a loss function that depends on expected forecast errors and information costs....

Forward-looking monetary models with Taylor-type interest rate rules are known to generate indeterminacies, with a potential dependence on extraneous "sunspots," for some structural and policy parameters. We investigate the stability of these solutions under adaptive learning, focusing on...

We study how the use of judgement or "add-factors" in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods. We isolate conditions under which new phenomena, which we call exuberance equilibria, can exist in standard macroeconomic...

We extend common factor analysis to a multi-dimensional setting by considering a bivariate reduced form consistent with many Real Business Cycle type models. We show how to obtain new representations of sunspots and find that there are parameter regions in which these sunspots are stable under...

A striking implication of the replacement of adaptive expectations by Rational Expectations was the "Lucas Critique," which showed that expectation parameters, and endogenous variable dynamics, depend on policy parameters. We consider this issue from the vantage point of a bounded rationality,...

We compare the performance of alternative recursive forecasting models. A simple constant gain algorithm, used widely in the learning literature, both forecasts well out of sample and also provides the best fit to the Survey of Professional Forecasters.

We investigate both the rational explosive inflation paths studied by (McCallum 2001), and the classification of fiscal and monetary polices proposed by (Leeper 1991), for stability under learning of the rational expectations equilibria (REE). Our first result is that the fiscalist REE in the...

We consider the impact of anticipated policy changes when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations. To model this we assume that agents combine limited structural knowledge with a standard adaptive learning rule. We analyze these issues using two...

This paper develops an adaptive learning formulation of an extension to the Ball, Mankiw and Reis (2005) sticky information model that incorporates endogenous inattention. We show that, following an exogenous increase in the policymaker's preferences for price vs. output stability, the learning...