Knowledge that Transforms

We show how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have an important effect on variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours. We start by documenting the strong evidence of time-varying volatility in the real interest rates faced by four emerging economies: Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. We estimate a stochastic volatility process for real interest rates. Then, we feed this process in a standard small open economy business cycle model. We find that an increase in real interest rate volatility triggers a fall in output, consumption, investment, hours, and debt.

A central difficulty in economics is to create a model with both good business cycle properties and asset pricing properties. I show how to solve this difficulty by a simple portable modeling device: the “disasterization” of models. Take an economy with good business cycle properties and create a new, “disasterized” economy, which is essentially identical to the original one except that disasters can destroy part of the capital stock and productivity. In such a disasterized economy, asset prices exhibit high and volatile risk premia, but macro variables remain unchanged. Perturbations of this benchmark allow for feedback from finance to macro.

We test for residential sorting and changes in neighborhood characteristics in response to the cleanup of hazardous waste sites using restricted access fine-geographical-resolution block data. We examine changes between 1990 and 2000 in blocks within 5km of sites that are proposed to the National Priority List that fall in a narrow interval of Hazardous Ranking Scores, comparing blocks near sites that were cleaned with those near sites that were not. Cleanup leads to increases in population density and housing unit density; increases in mean household income and shares of college-educated; but also to increases in the shares of minorities.

I study how limited abilities to process information affect choice behavior. I model the decision-making process by an automaton, and measure the complexity of a specific choice rule by the minimal number of states an automaton implementing the rule uses to process information. I establish that any choice rule that is less complicated than utility maximization displays framing effects. I then prove that choice rules that result from an optimal trade-off between maximizing utility and minimizing complexity are history-dependent satisficing procedures that display primacy and recency effects.

Discount‐rate variation is the central organizing question of current asset‐pricing research. I survey facts, theories, and applications. Previously, we thought returns were unpredictable, with variation in price‐dividend ratios due to variation in expected cashflows. Now it seems all price‐dividend variation corresponds to discount‐rate variation. We also thought that the cross‐section of expected returns came from the CAPM. Now we have a zoo of new factors. I categorize discount‐rate theories based on central ingredients and data sources. Incorporating discount‐rate variation affects finance applications, including portfolio theory, accounting, cost of capital, capital structure, compensation, and macroeconomics.