We analyze efficiency and nonfundamental volatility in a class of generalized beauty-contest economies with endogenous information. As in models of rational-expectations equilibria, agents learn about exogenous states and endogenous aggregate actions. As in models of rational inattention, agents choose their information structures subject to a cost. We identify conditions on information costs that guarantee the existence of efficient or inefficient equilibria; we further identify conditions that guarantee the existence or nonexistence of equilibria with zero nonfundamental volatility. Mutual information, the cost typically assumed in rational-inattention models, guarantees the existence of an efficient equilibrium with zero nonfundamental volatility.

We study optimal policy in a business-cycle setting in which firms hold dispersed private information about, or are rationally inattentive to, the state of the economy. The informational friction is the source of both nominal and real rigidity. Because of the latter, the optimal monetary policy does not target price stability. Instead, it targets a negative relation between the nominal price level and real economic activity. Such leaning against the wind helps maximize production efficiency. An additional contribution is the adaptation of the primal approach of the Ramsey literature to a flexible form of informational friction.

Does welfare improve when firms are better informed about the state of the economy and can thus better coordinate their production and pricing decisions? We address this question in an elementary business-cycle model that highlights how the dispersion of information can impede both kinds of decisions and, in this sense, be the source of both real and nominal rigidity. Within this context we develop a taxonomy for how the social value of information depends on the two rigidities, on the sources of the business cycle, and on the conduct of monetary policy.

How does an economy’s production structure determine its macroeconomic response to sectoral distortions? We study a static, multisector framework in which production is organized in an input-output network and production decisions are distorted. Sectoral distortions manifest at the aggregate level via two channels: total factor productivity (TFP) and the labor wedge. We show that near efficiency, distortions have zero first-order effects on TFP and nonzero first-order effects on the labor wedge, and that a sufficient statistic for the latter are the Domar weights. We thereby provide a Hulten-like theorem for the aggregate effects of sectoral distortions. A quantitative application of the model to the 2008–09 financial crisis suggests that the U.S. input-output structure amplified financial distortions by roughly a factor of two during the crisis.

This paper studies the optimal conduct of monetary policy in a multisector economy in which firms buy and sell intermediate goods over a production network. We first provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the monetary policy's ability to implement flexible‐price equilibria in the presence of nominal rigidities and show that, generically, no monetary policy can implement the first‐best allocation. We then characterize the optimal policy in terms of the economy's production network and the extent and nature of nominal rigidities. Our characterization result yields general principles for the optimal conduct of monetary policy in the presence of input‐output linkages: it establishes that optimal policy stabilizes a price index with greater weights assigned to larger, stickier, and more upstream industries, as well as industries with less sticky upstream suppliers but stickier downstream customers. In a calibrated version of the model, we find that implementing the optimal policy can result in quantitatively meaningful welfare gains.