Behavioral Theories of the Business Cycle

Nir Jaimovich, Sergio Rebelo

NBER Working Paper No. 12570
Issued in October 2006
NBER Program(s):   EFG

We explore the business cycle implications of expectation shocks and of two well-known psychological biases, optimism and overconfidence. The expectations of optimistic agents are biased toward good outcomes, while overconfident agents overestimate the precision of the signals that they receive. Both expectation shocks and overconfidence can increase business-cycle volatility, while preserving the model's properties in terms of comovement, and relative volatilities. In contrast, optimism is not a useful source of volatility in our model.

(147 K)

Published: Nir Jaimovich & Sergio Rebelo, 2007. "Behavioral Theories of the Business Cycle," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 5(2-3), pages 361-368, 04-05.

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Acknowledgments

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