Tag Archives: crei

note on beliefs and expectation

Yesterday and today I spend several hours on the conference held by Crei,

Information, Beliefs and Expectations in Macroeconomics

20 & 21 May 2011

Organized by Kristoffer Nimark (CREI & UPF) and Bartosz Maćkowiak (European Central Bank).

To be honest, I have waited for the conference for a while, as I was writing things on beliefs and expectations. However, this conference is a little bit out of my expectation - so again, my expectations deviates from the truth. My poor background in macro is definitely not enough to support me for understanding the presentations, and among all of them, I picked a few to stay and thus make myself confused. They were:

Exogenous Information, Endogenous Information, and Optimal Monetary Policy
Luigi Paciello | Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance
*Mirko Wiederholt | Northwestern University
Discussant: Jordi Galí | CREI & Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Learning about Consumption Dynamics
Michael Johannes | Columbia U., Columbia Business School
Lars Lochstoer | Columbia U., Columbia Business School
*Yiqun Mou | Columbia U., Columbia Business School
Discussant: Francisco Barillas | Emory U., Goizueta Business S.

Public’s Inflation Expectations and Monetary Policy
Leonardo Melosi | London Business School
Discussant: Francesco Bianchi | Duke University

Just as I had expected, it was too easy for me to get lost in these presentations. In a few minutes I got the feeling that I don't know what's going on so ever. well...Except for the fantastic graphs I have seen, I haven't gained much intuition from them.

A noteworthy point is in Mou's presentation, he empirically showed the convergence to rational expectation. I should admit I don't really understand the techniques he utilized, and so are the debates afterwards. After his presentation, I talked to him with the learning process a little bit, but haven't benefited a lot... there is still a long way to go.

Also, I found another interesting book to read,

1587, a year of no significance : the Ming dynasty in decline / Ray Huang

Very nice book on history. I really treasure this period of time that I have got enough space to read and think across different subjects. As planned before, I also found Keynes' book,

A Treatise on probability

Things are so beautiful!

the role of economic analysis - a reconsideration

A few days ago I went to the recruitment seminar of CREI, and the speaker was Dina Pomeranz from MIT. I don't know her before, but since both Ciccone and Azmat have mentioned her to me, I didn't want to miss her speech. So I was there.

I should admit that she made an interesting presentation. Her topic was pretty attractive - it was about VAT (value added tax). The title of her paper is "No Taxation without Information", and she mainly talks about the links among upstream and downstream firms in the VAT report process. It is pretty interesting that the information transmission plays such an vital role in this reporting cycle - how can we design an experiment/mechanism to prevent those firms from cheating/collusion.

Well, instead of repeating her presentation, I would like to talk about the role of economic analysis here. An interesting question is that: where do those people go after their postgraduate study in economics? I do not have the evidence, but I think that a big proportion of those economics students will end up being an analyst - especially those positions who offered by the government.  Then, they are doing economic analysis from the government's view, and offering advice for those policy makers. Perhaps it is the first time for me to realize that what can economic analysis provide for the running of the society. We are not only building those abstract and seemly useless models, but actually contributing to the constructions of several projects. That sounds somewhat great.