Inflation Expectations over the Life Cycle under Rational Inattention
by Jessica Schultz
Abstract
This paper explores how people track inflation over their lifetimes while facing tradeoffs between attention and certainty. It first employs a flexible modification of the Recursive Least Squares Learning approach from Malmendier and Nagel (MN) (2016) to find that households place weight on each inflation observation in a hump-shaped pattern over age when using past observations to set expectations about the future. This finding departs from MN, which models a strictly increasing weighting scheme with age. This paper then uses these findings to motivate a theory of Rational Inattention (RI) in inflation: as households age and accumulate wealth, their knowledge of the inflation rate becomes more important in their financial decisions–so they pay more attention to inflation. Consequently, as they decumulate wealth during their retirement, they have less reason to track inflation as accurately.
This paper subsequently formalizes this theory in a two-period RI model in which inflation-driven uncertainty in the interest rate between a working period and a retirement period can be reduced at a cost; this reduction in uncertainty occurs through observing an endogenously chosen signal that is correlated with the interest rate. It finds that as wealth increases before retirement, the optimal choice of signal precision increases as well. These findings help explain the hump-shaped weighting scheme for inflation observations in the empirical section, assuming changes in these weights over age are related in part to changes in household wealth. Ultimately, these findings suggest that monetary policy that focuses on long-term inflation stability or accounts for this heterogeneity may be most effective in anchoring consumer inflation expectations and increasing consumer welfare.
Professor Francesco Bianchi, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: E2, E21, E31
Taming the Dragon: The Modernization of the Chinese Equity Markets and its Effects on IPO Underpricing
By William Benesh
The extreme underpricing of Chinese Initial Public Offerings in the early days of the Chinese equity markets was reduced by several reforms instituted by the Chinese government from around 2000 to 2002. These reforms reduced 1-day returns on IPOs from 295% to 72%. The reforms reduced IPO underpricing by decreasing the inequality between IPO supply and demand. These reforms, while announced between 2000 and 2002, likely took until around 2004 to take full effect. In addition to inequality between supply and demand, other factors such as information asymmetry and government/quality signaling contributed to underpricing both before and after the reforms.
Advisors: Francesco Bianchi, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: G14, G15, G28, G30 | Tagged: China, Initial Public Offerings, Regulation, Stock Markets, Underpricing
