Uncertainty, Pessimism and Economic Fluctuations

Guangyu Pei
Additional contact information
Guangyu Pei: The Chinese University of Hong Kong

No 1494, 2019 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper develops a novel theory of uncertainty-driven business cycles that accommodates the notion of non-inflationary aggregate demand shocks out of variations in uncertainty. Instead of thinking uncertainty as risk, we regard uncertainty as ambiguity. We demonstrate that within the real business cycle model, ambiguity shocks, namely shock to the variance of agents' prior belief over possible models, can generate co-movements across real quantities without commensurate movements in labor productivity under the condition that agents are ambiguity averse and there exists a certain type of coordination friction among them. In response to a positive ambiguity, agents behave as if they believe aggregate demand is turning bad and becoming more volatile. The former translates into depressed market confidence, which makes all real quantities plummets. While the latter incentivizes agents use more of their private information both when making economic decisions and forecasts, which heightens the cross-sectional dispersions of beliefs. These predictions regarding agents' belief in our theory are consistent with survey data evidence. Finally, the quantitative potential of our theory is illustrated within a dynamic RBC model.

Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-mac and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2019/paper_1494.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed019:1494

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2019 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().