Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Behavioral macro economics

Here's the call for papers for an NBER conference:

"Call for Papers
NBER EFBEM Working Group
Andrew Caplin and Michael Woodford

We are organizing a meeting of the EFG research group on Behavioral Macro as part of the NBER's Summer Institute in Cambridge, MA, on Wednesday July 8. Note that the NBER Economic Fluctuations meeting itself is scheduled for Saturday, July 11, with other groups that may be of interest also meeting on other days of this same week. The meeting will run for the full day on July 8.

We are especially interested in papers that develop, test, and apply psychologically rich models of individual behavior, with implications for aggregate and/or financial market dynamics. One active focus of the group concerns perceptual constraints. The gap between potentially available information and subjectively perceived information has been the focus on much research in economics, psychology, and neuroscience. The resulting limits on comprehension have implications for inertial behavior and for both over-reaction and under-reaction to different types of shocks.

Another important focus is expectation formation, considering not simply how accurate or biased are forecasts, but also how people process past experience to predict the likely consequences of future actions. Research on this topic explores the implications of alternative models of expectation formation, both as explanations of positive phenomena and for purposes of policy design.

The group promotes work that tests models of perceptual constraints and expectation formation using survey data, laboratory and field experiments, and both individual-level and aggregate time series. Given its focus on psychologically and/or neuro-physiologically realistic theories, the group is actively interested in the generation of new forms of data that can aid in model estimation and policy evaluation.

We are writing to you because you may have a paper or abstract appropriate for the program.  (We prefer papers to abstracts.) If you have a paper that you would like to present, please upload a copy here by March 30, 2015: http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=SI15EFBEM. You are also welcome to forward this call for papers to colleagues who may have a paper suitable for the program.

We regret that, because of resource constraints, it will likely be impossible to respond to everyone who submits a paper.  You should expect to be contacted only if your paper has been included on the program.  In addition, this call for papers is widely distributed and the meeting room is small, so unfortunately we cannot invite everyone who receives this call to the meeting. Invitations and logistical information will be distributed in late April.  If you have any questions or need additional information please contact Rob Shannon in the NBER's Conference Department at 617/868-3900 or rshannon@nber.org."

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