This chapter studies how incomplete information helps accommodate frictions in coordination, leading to novel insights on the joint determination of expectations and macroeconomic outcomes. We review and synthesize recent work on global games, beauty contests, and their applications. We...

This paper provides a welfare economic analysis of the problem of districting. In the context of a simple micro-founded model intended to capture the salient features of U.S. politics, it studies how a social planner should allocate citizens of different ideologies across districts to maximize...

Using data on product-level prices matched to the producing firm's unit labor cost, we reject the hypothesis of a full and immediate pass-through of marginal cost. Since we focus on idiosyncratic variation, this does not fit the predictions of the Maćkowiak and Wiederholt (2009) version of the...

The weak rationality principle is not an empirical statement but a heuristic rule of how to proceed in social sciences. It is a necessary ingredient of any "understanding" social science in the Weberian sense. In this paper, first this principle and its role in economic theorizing is discussed....

Predator-prey relationships account for an important part of all interactions between species. In this paper we provide a microfoundation for such predator-prey relations in a food chain. Basic entities of our analysis are representative organisms of species modelled similar to economic...

This paper assumes that a central bank commits itself to maintaining an inflation target and then asks what measure of the inflation rate the central bank should use if it wants to maximize economic stability. The paper first formalizes this problem and examines its microeconomic foundations. It...

We study the impact of reputational incentives in markets characterized by moral hazard problems. Social preferences have been shown to enhance contract enforcement in these markets, while at the same time generating considerable wage and price rigidity. Reputation powerfully amplifies the...

In very different fields of economics, economic inference and policy evaluation require economists to parametrize a production function that links measures of input factors to measures of output. While doing so, strong assumptions are implicitly made about microeconomic variables governing the...

This paper compares the true, ex-ante forecasting performance of a micro-based model against both a standard macro model and a random walk. In contrast to existing literature, which is focused on longer horizon forecasting, we examine forecasting over horizons from one day to one month (the...

This paper assumes that a central bank commits itself to maintaining an inflation target and then asks what measure of the inflation rate the central bank should use if it wants to maximize economic stability. The paper first formalizes this problem and examines its microeconomic foundations. It...

This paper considers the appropriate stabilization objectives for monetary policy in a microfounded model with staggered price-setting. Rotemberg and Woodford (1997) and Woodford (2002) have shown that under certain conditions, a local approximation to the expected utility of the representative...

This paper views the standard production function in macroeconomics as a reduced form and derives its properties from microfoundations. The shape of this production function is governed by the distribution of ideas. If that distribution is Pareto, then two results obtain: the global production...

We provide an economically sound micro-foundation to linear price impact models, by deriving them as the equilibrium of a suitable agent-based system. Our setup generalizes the well-known Kyle model, by dropping the assumption of a terminal time at which fundamental information is revealed so to...

The literature on agent-based macroeconomics has grown substantially over the past decade. However, a typically small set of common features impedes an instructive comparison of model results and obscures the implications of specific model assumptions. While validation and model selection...

This paper develops a microfounded dynamic dual-currency model subject to commitment and bargaining frictions featuring endogenous acceptance of alternative currencies as a function of jointly-determined fiscal and monetary policy. Steady-state public expenditures, public debt, distortionary...

Productivity rises in booms and falls in recessions. There are four main explanations for this procyclical productivity: (i) procyclical technology shocks, (ii) widespread imperfect competition and increasing returns, (iii) variable utilization of inputs over the cycle, and (iv) resource...

The role of inventories in making prices "sticky" is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear-quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand, but able to store its finished goods in inventory. It is shown that, in contrast to the usual presumption, firms that exhibit the smallest...

I show that the indivisible labor' models of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992), and many others are, when aggregated across persons with the same marginal utility of income, equivalent to the divisible labor model of Lucas and...

The paper studies the relevance of product heterogeneity for innovation dynamics using an agent-based model. The vantage point is a short a review on the empirical relevance of capability accumulation for innovation processes and an assessment of how these processes are modelled theoretically in...

A DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model is used to report the empirical behavior of the Argentine economy during the administration of the Cambiemos government coalition. Two main aspects have been taken into account: on the one hand, the debate on the economic policy of the...

This paper summarizes Horwitz's contributions in Micro-foundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective and evaluates its connection with recent contributions in Austrian macroeconomics. The paper emphasizes the connection between relative price, monetary equilibrium, and monetary policy....

Where do new resources come from? We build on the premise that environments feature vast reservoirs of latent resources, uses and resource combinations. However, identifying this value can be costly and difficult. In this paper we consider the thought experiment of an endowment-less firm and how...

This paper provides a look into what Lucas meant by the term 'analogue systems' and how he conceived making them useful. It is argued that any model can be regarded as an analogue system provided it has remarkable predictive success. The term is thus neutral in terms of usefulness. To be useful,...

A DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model is used to report the empirical behavior of the Argentine economy during the administration of the Cambiemos government coalition. Two main aspects have been taken into account: on the one hand, the debate on the economic policy of the...

The paper studies the relevance of product heterogeneity for innovation dynamics using an agent-based model. The vantage point is a short a review on the empirical relevance of capability accumulation for innovation processes and an assessment of how these processes are modelled theoretically in...

The author set up a simplistic agent-based model where agents learn with reinforcement observing an incomplete set of variables. The model is employed to generate an artificial dataset that is used to estimate standard macro econometric models. The author shows that the results are qualitatively...

Germany’s austerity-oriented economic policy is the wrong approach. Markets need demand stimulation to achieve full use of resources, argues Krugman, a Keynesian economist. Neoclassical economists have been warning that expansionary macroeconomic policies are not only useless but can even be...

Edmond Malinvaud’s case is peculiar in the history of Macro as he committed to two different microfoundational programs, namely the disequilibrium theory (more properly, the non-Walrasian approach) and the practice of large-scale macroeconomic modeling. Such a twofold commitment was far from...

"Keynes' macroeconomic revolution is based on his microfoundations of economic behaviour derived from 'casual' observations but impressively substantiated by rigorous research in behavioural economics and neurology. Ronald Schettkat argues that the allegation of the missing microfoundations in...