Inflation Expectations
Inflation Expectations

Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-12-16

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1135179778

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Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Assessing Rational Expectations 2
Assessing Rational Expectations 2

Author: Roger Guesnerie

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-02-18

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 9780262262903

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A theoretical assessment of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis through subjecting a collection of economic models to an "eductive stability" test. The rational expectations hypothesis (REH) dominates economic modeling in areas ranging from monetary theory, macroeconomics, and general equilibrium to finance. In this book, Roger Guesnerie continues the critical analysis of the REH begun in his Assessing Rational Expectations: Sunspot Multiplicity and Economic Fluctuations, which dealt with the questions raised by multiplicity and its implications for a theory of endogenous fluctuations. This second volume emphasizes "eductive" learning: relying on careful reasoning, agents must deduce what other agents guess, a process that differs from the standard evolutionary learning experience in which agents make decisions about the future based on past experiences. A broad "eductive" stability test is proposed that includes common knowledge and results in a unique "rationalizable expectations equilibrium." This test provides the basis for Guesnerie's theoretical assessment of the plausibility of the REH's expectational coordination, emphasizing, for different categories of economic models, conditions for the REH's success or failure. Guesnerie begins by presenting the concepts and methods of the eductive stability analysis in selected partial equilibrium models. He then explores to what extent general equilibrium strategic complementarities interfere with partial equilibrium considerations in the formation of stable expectations. Guesnerie next examines two issues relating to eductive stability in financial market models, speculation and asymmetric price information. The dynamic settings of an infinite horizon model are then taken up, and particular standard and generalized saddle-path solutions are scrutinized. Guesnerie concludes with a review of general questions and some "cautious" remarks on the policy implications of his analysis.

Expectations and Economic Fluctuations
Expectations and Economic Fluctuations

Author: Sylvain Leduc

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2010-10

Total Pages: 39

ISBN-13: 1437933823

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Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity, the authors study how changes in expectations, and their interaction with monetary policy, contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. They find that changes in expected future economic activity are a quantitatively important driver of economic fluctuations: a perception that good times are ahead typically leads to a significant rise in current measures of economic activity and inflation. Short-term interest rate rises in response to expectations of good times as monetary policy tightens. ¿Provides quantitative evidence on the importance of expectations-driven business cycles and on the role that monetary policy plays in shaping them.¿ Charts and tables.

Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics
Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics

Author: George W. Evans

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-01-06

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1400824265

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A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach. Depending on the particular economic structure, the economy may converge to a standard rational-expectations or a "rational bubble" solution, or exhibit persistent learning dynamics. The learning approach also provides tools to assess the importance of new models with expectational indeterminacy, in which expectations are an independent cause of macroeconomic fluctuations. Moreover, learning dynamics provide a theory for the evolution of expectations and selection between alternative equilibria, with implications for business cycles, asset price volatility, and policy. This book provides an authoritative treatment of this emerging field, developing the analytical techniques in detail and using them to synthesize and extend existing research.

Monetary Policy Mistakes and the Evolution of Inflation Expectations
Monetary Policy Mistakes and the Evolution of Inflation Expectations

Author: Athanasios Orphanides

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 46

ISBN-13: 1437935613

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What monetary policy framework, if adopted by the Federal Reserve, would have avoided the Great Inflation of the 1960s and 1970s? The authors use counterfactual simulations of an estimated model of the U.S. economy to evaluate alternative monetary policy strategies. The authors document that policymakers at the time both had an overly optimistic view of the natural rate of unemployment and put a high priority on achieving full employment. They show that in the presence of realistic informational imperfections and with an emphasis on stabilizing economic activity, an optimal control approach would have failed to keep inflation expectations well anchored, resulting in highly volatile inflation during the 1970s. Charts and tables.

A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconometrics
A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconometrics

Author: Frederic S. Mishkin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0226531929

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A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconometrics pursues a rational expectations approach to the estimation of a class of models widely discussed in the macroeconomics and finance literature: those which emphasize the effects from unanticipated, rather than anticipated, movements in variables. In this volume, Fredrick S. Mishkin first theoretically develops and discusses a unified econometric treatment of these models and then shows how to estimate them with an annotated computer program.

Imperfect Knowledge Economics
Imperfect Knowledge Economics

Author: Roman Frydman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0691261156

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Posing a major challenge to economic orthodoxy, Imperfect Knowledge Economics asserts that exact models of purposeful human behavior are beyond the reach of economic analysis. Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg argue that the longstanding empirical failures of conventional economic models stem from their futile efforts to make exact predictions about the consequences of rational, self-interested behavior. Such predictions, based on mechanistic models of human behavior, disregard the importance of individual creativity and unforeseeable sociopolitical change. Scientific though these explanations may appear, they usually fail to predict how markets behave. And, the authors contend, recent behavioral models of the market are no less mechanistic than their conventional counterparts: they aim to generate exact predictions of "irrational" human behavior. Frydman and Goldberg offer a long-overdue response to the shortcomings of conventional economic models. Drawing attention to the inherent limits of economists' knowledge, they introduce a new approach to economic analysis: Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). IKE rejects exact quantitative predictions of individual decisions and market outcomes in favor of mathematical models that generate only qualitative predictions of economic change. Using the foreign exchange market as a testing ground for IKE, this book sheds new light on exchange-rate and risk-premium movements, which have confounded conventional models for decades. Offering a fresh way to think about markets and representing a potential turning point in economics, Imperfect Knowledge Economics will be essential reading for economists, policymakers, and professional investors.

Narrative Economics
Narrative Economics

Author: Robert J. Shiller

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0691212074

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From Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events—and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses Stories people tell—about financial confidence or panic, housing booms, or Bitcoin—can go viral and powerfully affect economies, but such narratives have traditionally been ignored in economics and finance because they seem anecdotal and unscientific. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Shiller explains why we ignore these stories at our peril—and how we can begin to take them seriously. Using a rich array of examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that influence individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—may vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises and other major economic events. The result is nothing less than a new way to think about the economy, economic change, and economics. In a new preface, Shiller reflects on some of the challenges facing narrative economics, discusses the connection between disease epidemics and economic epidemics, and suggests why epidemiology may hold lessons for fighting economic contagions.

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence
The Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Author: Ajay Agrawal

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-03-05

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0226833127

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A timely investigation of the potential economic effects, both realized and unrealized, of artificial intelligence within the United States healthcare system. In sweeping conversations about the impact of artificial intelligence on many sectors of the economy, healthcare has received relatively little attention. Yet it seems unlikely that an industry that represents nearly one-fifth of the economy could escape the efficiency and cost-driven disruptions of AI. The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges brings together contributions from health economists, physicians, philosophers, and scholars in law, public health, and machine learning to identify the primary barriers to entry of AI in the healthcare sector. Across original papers and in wide-ranging responses, the contributors analyze barriers of four types: incentives, management, data availability, and regulation. They also suggest that AI has the potential to improve outcomes and lower costs. Understanding both the benefits of and barriers to AI adoption is essential for designing policies that will affect the evolution of the healthcare system.