To improve the stability of the banking system the Dodd-Frank Act mandates that central banks conduct periodic evaluations of banks’ financial conditions. An intensely debated aspect of these ‘stress tests’ regards how much of that information generated by stress tests should be disclosed to financial markets. This paper uses an environment constructed from a model by Goldstein and Leitner (2018) to gain some behavioral insight into the policy tradeoffs associated with disclosure. Experimental results indicate that variations in disclosure conditions are sensitive to overbidding for bank assets. Absent overbidding, however, optimal disclosure robustly improves risk sharing even when banks behave non-optimally.

Abstract One of the dangers of high inflation is that it can cause individuals to pay close attention to it. This internalization of inflation can lead to an accelerationist regime, making inflation harder to control. We empirically assess the relationship between attention and inflation for 38 countries. Our measures of attention are constructed from Internet search behavior or the popularity of inflation mentions on Twitter. We find evidence that attention thresholds exist for most of the countries, and that they typically occur between 2% and 4% inflation. We also document interesting variability across countries and find similar thresholds in newspaper coverage of inflation.