Thesis advisor: Rosen Valchev / I study how economic conditions and strategic incentives affect belief formation of rational agents with a limited information processing capacity. I study the impact of cognitive and information frictions on individual risk taking, investment and portfolio choice, and their implications on aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations. In my first chapter "Rational Overoptimism and Moral hazard in Credit Booms" I develop a framework in which over optimism in credit booms originates from rational decisions of managers. Because of moral hazard, managers pay too little attention to the aggregate conditions that generate risk, leading them to over borrow and over invest during booms. Periods of low risk premia predict higher default rates, higher probability of crises and systematic negative banks excess returns, in line with existing evidence. I document a negative relation between the convexity of CEO's compensation and their information on a larger sample of firms, which is consistent with my theory. My model implies that compensation regulation can play an important role in macro prudential policy. In my second chapter "Biased Surveys" Rosen Valchev and I improve on the standard tests for the FIRE hypothesis by allowing for both public and private information, and find new interesting results. First, we propose a new empirical strategy that can accommodate this richer information structure, and find that the true degree of information rigidity is about a third higher than previously estimated. Second, we find that individual forecasts over-react to private information but under-react to public information. We show that this is consistent with a theory of strategic diversification incentives in forecast reporting, where forecasters are rational but report a biased measure of their true expectations. This has two effects. First, it generates what looks like behavioral “over-reaction” in expectations, and second biases the information rigidity estimate further downward. Overall, our results caution against the use of survey of forecasts as a direct measure of expectations, and suggest that the true underlying beliefs are rational, but suffer from a much larger degree of imperfect information than previously thought. This has particularly profound implications for monetary policy, where inflation expectations play a key role. I explore further how economic incentives shape beliefs in my third chapter "International Trade and Portfolio Diversification". I show that information choice can explain the puzzling positive relation between bilateral investment and trade across countries. I present a model of endogenous information with both investment in assets and income from trade. While standard model of risk-hedging would require agents to invest in non-trading countries to diversify income risk, I show that limited information capacity and preferences for early resolution of uncertainty reverse this result. The intuition is that investors collect more information on trading partners to reduce income uncertainty, and therefore perceive their equity as less risky. I find that allowing for information choice reduces the role of risk hedging on portfolio decisions. I test my model’s implied relation between trade and attention in the data and find robust empirical support. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The thesis focuses on the analysis of a Behavioral New Keynesian DSGE model. In particular, various specifications of the model are collected from the existing literature and their combinations are simulated. The specifications include heuristics for forecasting output gap, sets of estimated or calibrated parameters and model structures. The resulting simulated output and inflation gap series are compared with the macroeconomic stylized facts and real world data from the US and Euro area based on their distributional characteristics and autocorrelation structures. In addition, a comparison of various simulated model specifications is performed based on the level of correlation between fractions of agents following a specific heuristic and the resulting output and inflation gap values. The distributional characteristics of the US output gap seem to be matched the best by the specifications with unbiased and extrapolative output gap heuristics generating series with higher levels of variance and kurtosis. Contrarily, the Euro output gap is best matched by specifications with optimistic, pessimistic and unbi- ased heuristics producing series with lower levels of variance and kurtosis. Second, the autocorrelation structure of the simulated series tends to mirror the stylized facts as opposed to the...

Abstract This dissertation is comprised of three independent essays with the unifying theme of how uncertainty affects the macroeconomy. The first essay studies an incomplete market economy where the firm faces a non-trivial investment decision due to capital adjustment costs. The adjustment costs make the price of capital endogenous and help to explain the observed volatility of the returns to physical capital. The particular form of market incompleteness that is assumed in the essay is however not enough to match the observed price of risk. The essay contains also a technical contribution in showing how Arrow prices of contingent commodities can be used in computing the equilibrium in this class of models. The second essay studies the effect of population aging on asset prices. The modeling framework features deterministic transition paths for demographic structure and level of government expenditures along with aggregate uncertainty at business cycle frequency. The demographic transition leads to a projected increase of in tax rates that are needed to finance the government expenditures. This requires higher savings rates from households which reduces volatility of consumption growth and reduces the price of aggregate risk. The third essay is an empirical study which uses betting market data from the Swedish harness horse racing in conjunction with economic confidence indices. The main finding is that the risk attitudes of bettors that are reflected by the betting market data covary with the more traditional confidence measures in a reasonable way. The essay also contains a simple forecasting exercise which shows that the novel risk measure may also be useful in forecasting the industrial production. The results of the study are interpreted in terms of behavioral macroeconomics. / Tiivistelmä Tämä väitöskirja koostuu kolmesta erillisestä esseestä, joiden yhdistävä tekijä on epävarmuus ja sen vaikutukset makrotalouden ilmiöihin. Ensimmäisessä esseessä tarkastellaan taloutta, jossa markkinat ovat epätäydelliset ja fyysisen pääoman sopeuttamiskustannukset vaikuttavat yrityksen investointipäätökseen. Pääoman sopeuttamiskustannukset tekevät pääoman hinnasta endogeenisen muuttujan ja auttavat selittämään havaittua pääoman tuottojen volatiliteettia. Tutkimuksessa käytetyt markkinoiden epätäydellisyyteen johtavat oletukset eivät kuitenkaan riitä selittämään historiallisesti havaittua riskin hintaa. Essee sisältää myös teknisen kontribuution. Siinä osoitetaan, miten talouden tilasta riippuvien hyödykkeiden Arrow-hintoja voidaan hyödyntää tämän tyyppisten talouksien tasapainon numeerisessa ratkaisemisessa. Toinen essee tarkastelee väestön ikääntymisen vaikutuksia varallisuushyödykkeiden hintoihin. Malli yhdistää väestörakenteen ja julkisten kulutusmenojen deterministisen muutoksen sekä suhdannevaihtelua kuvaavan kokonaistaloudellisen epävarmuuden. Väestörakenteen odotettu muutos johtaa julkisten kulutusmenojen kasvun myötä veroasteiden nousuun. Kotitaloudet joutuvat säästämään enemmän, mikä vähentää kulutuksen kasvun volatiliteettia ja kokonaistaloudellisen riskin hintaa. Kolmas essee on empiirinen tutkimus, jossa käytetään havaintoaineistoa Ruotsin ravivedonlyöntimarkkinoilta sekä taloudellisia luottamusindikaattoreita. Tärkein tulos on että vedonlyöntiaineiston heijastama suhtautuminen riskiin näyttää olevan vuorovaikutuksessa perinteisten luottamusindikaattoreiden kanssa. Esseessä käytetään myös yksinkertaista aikasarjamallia, joka viittaa siihen, että vedonlyöntiaineiston perusteella laskettu riskiin suhtautumisen mitta voi olla hyödyllinen teollisuustuotannon ennustamisessa. Tuloksia tulkitaan behavioraalisen makrotaloustieteen valossa.