Semi-Daily Journal Archive

The Blogspot archive of the weblog of J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and Chair of the PEIS major at U.C. Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Sticky Information

Mankiw and Reis write:

Pervasive Stickiness (Expanded Version): Pervasive Stickiness (Expanded Version): N. Gregory Mankiw, Ricardo Reis: NBER Working Paper No. 12024: Issued in February 2006: This paper explores a macroeconomic model of the business cycle in which stickiness of information is pervasive. We start from a familiar benchmark classical model and add to it the assumption that there is sticky information on the part of consumers, workers, and firms. We evaluate the model against three key facts that describe short-run fluctuations: the acceleration phenomenon, the smoothness of real wages, and the gradual response of real variables to shocks. We find that pervasive stickiness is required to fit the facts. We conclude that models based on stickiness of information offer the promise of fitting the facts on business cycles while adding only one new plausible ingredient to the classical benchmark.

Good idea. But why should information be "sticky"? And why should its stickiness be "pervasive"? Isn't a better world possible in which much more infoermation about macroeconomic events is available in a non-sticky way?

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