CAREER: Analysis of Prices, Informational Rigidities and Productivity Differences

这个项目旨在解决宏观经济学中的三个关键问题。第一个问题是，价格在多大程度上是不灵活的，衡量价格粘性程度的最佳方法是什么，这对宏观经济动态和最优政策设计有什么影响？这个问题与宏观经济学的核心争论之一有关，即名义冲击是否具有重大的实际影响。虽然有证据表明，微观层面的价格确实可以在短期内固定，但销售往往会打断相当长一段时间内稳定的价格。具体来说，对于无法调整常规或参考价格的公司来说，临时销售可能是一种价格灵活性。价格，即在很长一段时间内保持固定的价格。因此，当企业想要降低价格时，他们不必改变常规价格。相反，他们引入更深入、更频繁的销售，使消费者支付的有效价格低于正常价格的建议价格。在这种情况下，在整个商业周期中，有效价格可能比正常价格更具灵活性和顺周期性，因此反周期政策的理由可能会大大削弱。同样，消费者可以改变网点以寻求更好的价格，从而使交易中实际支付的价格比公布的价格更灵活。后者在电子商务中尤其重要，因为搜索成本最低，消费者不仅可以根据经济状况很容易地从一个卖家切换到另一个卖家，而且还可以从通常对相同商品收取更高价格的常规实体店切换到另一个实体店。该项目将研究销售和门店替代的周期性特性，以及在线市场的价格特性，在线市场是零售行业中日益重要的一部分。除了改善逆周期政策的设计外，该项目还将为提高劳工统计局和其他私营和公共机构编制的价格指数提供信息。例如，该项目可以提供有关抽样技术（例如，在经济低迷时期更多地抽样折扣店和在线市场）、收集数据类型（例如，使用实际支付的价格而不是公布的价格；收集数量）和汇总（例如，使用不同类型商店之间可能存在差异的支出权重，而不是对产品类别应用统一权重）的指导方针。第二个问题是，在决定宏观经济总量和个体经济主体的行为时，信息刚性的作用是什么？长期以来，经济主体如何形成预期一直是宏观经济学中最基本的问题之一。事实上，放弃适应性预期而支持理性预期是20世纪70年代开始重建宏观经济学的一个决定性特征，大多数现代宏观经济模型都假设所有主体的完全信息理性预期。然而，最近发生的事件对在完全信息理性预期假设下分析的模型的一般有效性提出了质疑。例如，2008年银行间拆借市场的冻结，在一定程度上反映了其他机构财务状况的不确定性，这一特征与现代宏观经济模型的全信息假设以及价格包含所有相关信息的概念不符。应对此类信息限制无疑将是后危机时代宏观经济模型的一个基本组成部分。虽然最近有一些理论工作侧重于更好地理解经济主体在获取和处理信息时所面临的摩擦和限制，但由于缺乏量化这些概念的强有力的经验证据，这项研究受到了阻碍。该项目将开发和使用一个通用框架来记录、分类和量化不同代理所面临的信息僵化的性质。这个框架不仅可以用来直接将信息不完善的模型映射到经验对应物，而且可以很容易地应用于各种经济主体，如专业预测者、消费者、公司、中央银行和金融市场。由于信息摩擦可以解释数据的许多特征，这些特征很难与全信息的共同假设相协调，因此本项目通过提供关于信息刚性的一组强大的程式化事实，将为更有经验的信息约束理论奠定基础。这将阐明经济学中最基本的问题之一，即预期形成过程的本质，并将直接适用于经济学的各个领域。由于几个原因，该项目的结果将与决策者相关。首先，信息摩擦的性质对福利计算和最优政策的设计具有重要影响。通过评估哪些信息摩擦在数量上是重要的，本项目将为政策分析提供一个关键因素。其次，该项目将正式调查不同类型的代理人所面临的信息摩擦的相互作用，特别是当一种代理人（例如，中央银行）可能具有信息优势，因此政策变化可能通过代理人对经济产生间接影响。从政策变化中了解经济状况。最后，信息摩擦的性质会影响政策变化的实施方式。例如，政策制定者对当前和未来的行动方针是不透明还是透明，关键取决于经济主体如何收集和处理信息。第三个问题是，各国生产率和收入差异的来源是什么？人们普遍认为，经济增长和生产力提高的关键渠道是创新，它为经济带来新的商品和服务，以及生产现有商品和服务的新方法。显然，产权质量、金融市场发展、股权结构等因素影响着创新强度，对这些因素进行了大量的研究。然而，令人惊讶的是，尽管马克斯·韦伯和其他人认为文化在解释国家财富方面发挥了基本作用，关于文化经济影响的文献也在迅速增长，但迄今为止，还没有多少系统的工作从理论上和经验上考察文化对创新、生产力和发展的影响。该项目旨在广泛探索生产力和创新差异的来源，重点是文化差异。具体而言，该项目将研究文化如何影响个人选择偏离规范，尝试新技术和新产品，文化如何影响资源分配和贸易专业化，文化如何促进经济行为和公共产品提供的政治约束。该项目还将研究长期以来基因和文化/经济成果的共同进化。这个项目的结果将有助于了解文化制约因素，因此将有助于加强发展政策，以现有文化及其优势为基础，而不是改变不适合特定文化环境的政策。除了为经济学家提供有关发展及其与文化相互作用的关键问题的新见解外，该项目还旨在将经济学与社会学、政治学、人类学、心理学和遗传学等其他学科联系起来。

This project is aimed to address three key questions in macroeconomics. The first question is, To what extent are prices inflexible, what is the best way to measure the degree of price stickiness, and what are the implications for macroeconomic dynamics and optimal policy design? This question is related to one of the central debates in macroeconomics, which is whether nominal shocks have significant real effects. While there is evidence that prices at the micro level could indeed be fixed for short periods of time, sales often interrupt fairly long intervals of otherwise stable prices. Specifically, temporary sales could be a form of price flexibility for firms that are unable to adjust their regular or ?reference? prices, i.e. prices that tend to remain fixed for prolonged periods of time. Thus, when firms want to lower prices, they do not have to change their regular prices. Instead, they introduce deeper and more frequent sales so that the effective price paid by consumers is lower than suggested by the regular price. In this scenario, the effective prices could be much more flexible and procyclical over the business cycle than regular prices and therefore the rationale for countercyclical policy could be considerably undermined. Likewise, consumers can change outlets to seek better prices and thus make prices actually paid in transactions more flexible than is implied by posted prices. The latter could be particularly important in e-commerce where search costs are minimal and consumers can easily switch outlets not only from one seller to another in response to economic conditions but also switch away from regular brick-and-mortar stores which typically charge higher prices for identical goods relative to online stores. This project will study cyclical properties of sales and outlet substitution as well as properties of prices in online markets which is an increasingly important segment in the retail industry. Apart from improving design of countercyclical policies, this project will also be informative for enhancing price indexes constructed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other private and public agencies. For example, this project can provide guidelines on sampling techniques (e.g., sample discount stores and online markets more during downturns), types of collected data (e.g., use prices actually paid rather than posted prices; collect quantities), and aggregation (e.g., use expenditure weights potentially differentiated across types of stores rather than apply a uniform weight for a product category). The second question is, What is the role of information rigidities in determining the behavior of macroeconomic aggregates and individual economic agents? How economic agents form their expectations has long been one of the most fundamental questions in macroeconomics. Indeed, the abandonment of adaptive expectations in favor of rational expectations was one of the defining features in the rebuilding of macroeconomics starting in the 1970s and most modern macroeconomic models assume full-information rational expectations on the part of all agents. Recent events, however, have called into question the general validity of models analyzed under the assumption of full-information rational expectations. For example, the freezing of interbank lending markets in 2008 reflected in part uncertainty about the financial positions of other institutions, a feature at odds with the full-information assumption of modern macroeconomic models and the notion that prices incorporate all pertinent information. Coming to grips with such informational constraints will undoubtedly be a fundamental component of post-crisis macroeconomic models. While there has been some recent theoretical work focused on better understanding the frictions and limitations faced by economic agents in the acquisition and processing of information, this research has been hampered by a lack of robust empirical evidence that quantifies these concepts. This project will develop and use a general framework to document, classify and quantify the nature of information rigidities faced by different agents. This framework can not only be used to directly map models of informational imperfections to empirical counterparts but can also be readily applied to a variety of economic agents such as professional forecasters, consumers, firms, central banks, and financial markets. Since informational frictions can explain numerous features of the data which are difficult to reconcile with the common assumption of full-information, this project, by providing a robust set of stylized facts about informational rigidities, will lay the groundwork for a more empirically justified theory of information constraints. This will shed light on one of the most fundamental questions in economics, the nature of the expectations formation process, and will be directly applicable to a variety of fields in economics. The results of the project will be relevant to policy-makers for several reasons. First, the nature of the informational frictions has critical implications for welfare calculations and hence the design of optimal policy. By assessing which informational frictions are quantitatively important, this project will provide a key ingredient for policy analyses. Second, the project will formally investigate the interaction of informational frictions faced by different types of agents especially when one type of agents (e.g., the central bank) may have an informational advantage and thus policy changes may induces indirect effects on the economy through agents? learning about economic conditions from policy changes. Finally, the nature of informational frictions can impact how policy changes should be implemented. For example, whether policymakers should be opaque or transparent about the current and future course of actions crucially depends on how economic agents collect and process information. The third question is, What is the source of productivity and income differences across countries? It is widely perceived that the key conduit of economic growth and productivity enhancements is innovation that brings new goods and services to the economy as well as new ways to produce existing goods and services. Obviously, many factors such as quality of property rights, development of financial markets and ownership structure affect the intensity of innovation and a great deal of effort was put into studying these factors. However, it is surprising that although Max Weber and others have argued that culture played a fundamental role in explaining the wealth of nations and the literature on the economic effects of culture is growing fast, there has so far been little systematic work examining theoretically and empirically the effect of culture on innovation, productivity and development. This project is aimed to broadly explore sources of variation in productivity and innovation with an emphasis on cultural differences. Specifically, the project will investigate how culture affects individual choices to deviate from norms and try new technologies and goods, how culture influences allocation of resources and specialization in trade, how culture contributes to political constraints on economic behavior and provision of public goods. The project will also study co-evolution of genes and cultural/economic outcomes over long periods of time. The results of this project will be instrumental in understanding cultural constraints and thus will help to enhance developmental policies by building on existing cultures and their strengths instead of transposing policies that are not adequate to a given cultural environment. Apart from providing economists with new insights into key questions about development and its interplay with culture, this project is meant to bridge economics to other disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, and genetics.