Essays in macroeconomics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This thesis studies the effect of incompleteness in information and heterogeneity in preferences on two different aspects of macroeconomics: public communication and distortions implied by general equilibrium models with a representative agent. The first chapter builds a dynamic model of the information flow between heterogeneously partially informed financial institutions and a public agency. The financial institutions decide how to allocate their portfolio between a riskless technology with known payoff and a risky technology whose payoff is unknown. The public agency learns about the value of the unknown payoff by observing the actions of the financial institutions and decides whether to communicate the information at the agency's disposal. The work characterizes the optimal public communication plans and shows that they involve delayed communication. The second chapter studies the public communication problem in a abstract setting where agents want to match an unknown parameter evolving over time. A benevolent public authority learns about the fundamentals by observing agents' actions. Differently than in the first chapter, in any period the public authority decides how much of its knowledge to communicate in a public signal every period. Simulations of the model show that the welfare maximizing communication strategies involve opaque communication, that is adding noise to the public signal. In the last chapter, joint work with Aaron Bodoh-Creed, we show that in economies where agents have heterogeneous preferences that can be represented with Hansen and Sargent's multiplier preferences form, the representative agent will not have multiplier preferences. We consider the errors induced in model outcomes if an econometrician assumes the representative agent has a multiplier preferences form utility function in the context of exchange and production general equilibrium economies and provide conditions under which the two problems are the same. An appendix extends our results to a two period dynamic general equilibrium economy with savings.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Copyright date | 2011 |
| Publication date | 2010, c2011; 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Miccoli, Marcello |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
| Primary advisor | Amador, Manuel (Manuel A.) |
| Thesis advisor | Amador, Manuel (Manuel A.) |
| Thesis advisor | Jaimovich, Nir |
| Thesis advisor | Schneider, Klaus |
| Advisor | Jaimovich, Nir |
| Advisor | Schneider, Klaus |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Marcello Miccoli. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Marcello Miccoli
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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