Previous work by has shown that lumpy investment models well characterize individual expenditures on durables, in particular automobiles. In that class of models, a higher level of uncertainty generally implies that the household should tolerate a larger imbalance between the actual stock of the durable and the target stock before closing it by buying and/or selling. Then, if the level of uncer...

In McLean and Postlewaite (Econometrica 56, 1992, p. 2421), we analyzed pure exchange economies with asymmetrically informed agents. We defined a notion of informational size and showed that, when the aggregate information of all agents resolves nearly all the uncertainty regarding the state of nature, the conflict between incentive compatibility and (ex post) efficiency can be made small if ag...

UNLABELLED The objective of this paper is to verify the hypotheses presented in the literature on the causal relationship between inflation and its uncertainty, for the newest EU countries. To ensure the robustness of the results, in the study four models for inflation uncertainty are estimated in parallel: ARCH (1), GARCH (1,1), EGARCH (1,1,1) and PARCH (1,1,1). The Granger method is used to t...

A decision maker tests whether the gradient of loss function evaluated at a judgmental is zero. If test does not reject, action decision. rejects, sets equal to boundary rejection region. This statistical rule admissible and conditions on sample realization. The confidence level reflects maker’s aversion uncertainty. applied problem asset allocation. JEL Classification: C1, C11, C12, C13, D81

I consider issues in distributed computation that should be of relevance to game theory. In particular, I focus on (a) representing knowledge and uncertainty, (b) dealing with failures, and (c) specification of mechanisms.  2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D80; D83

We examine how the interaction between monetary policy and macroeconomic conditions affects inflation uncertainty in the long-term. The unobservable inflation uncertainty is quantified by means of the slowly evolving long-term variance component of inflation in the framework of the Spline-GARCH model (Engle and Rangel, 2008). For a cross-section of 13 developed economies, we find that long-term...

Global climate change is rife with uncertainties. Yet, we can expect to resolve much of this uncertainty in the next 100 years or so. Therefore, current actions should reflect the value of flexibility. Nevertheless, most models of climate change, particularly game-theoretic models, abstract from uncertainty. Additionally, most analysis of climate change abstracts completely from the idea that t...

In this paper we re–examine banks’ lending behavior taking into account changes in the stance of monetary policy in conjunction with changes in financial sector uncertainty. Using a very large data set covering all banks in the US between 1979–2000, we show that financial sector uncertainty plays an important role in banks’ lending decisions: for a given size classification, less liquid banks (...

Extension of Labor Contracts and Optimal Backpay This paper explains why a union and a firm might settle on a contract duration that may later be extended and characterizes the optimal backpay for the holdout period. It is shown that the choice between concluding a shorter contract that may be extended and immediately concluding a longer contract depends on the prevalence of the different types...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy under uncertainty in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. We use a Markov jump-linear-quadratic (MJLQ) approach to study policy design, approximating the uncertainty by different discrete modes in a Markov chain, and by taking mode-dependent linear-quadratic approximations of the underlying model. This allows us to apply a powerful meth...