The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...
Inspired by our namesakes, Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who believed that economics research could help improve the world, BFI works with the Chicago Economics community to turn its evidence-based research into real-world impact.
The Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) is intended to serve as a bridge between college and graduate school for students interested in empirical economics. The program offers unique research and professional training opportunities at the University of Chicago.
Expanding Discovery in Economics+ (EDE+) brings together a diverse group of early undergraduate students to hone their research abilities and technical skills.
Al-Mahdi Ebsim, Chen Lian, Yueran Ma, Pablo Ottonello, and Diego J. Perez
In traditional macro-finance models, firms’ debt contracts impose hard borrowing constraints, which require indiscriminate reductions of borrowing and investment when adverse shocks tighten these limits, giving rise to financial acceleration. We study the macroeconomic implications of “sophisticated borrowing constraints” akin...
Robert D. Metcalfe, Alexandre B. Sollaci, and Chad Syverson
Mergers are commonly evaluated by weighing their expected market power effects against any efficiency gains they create. The larger the market power effect of a proposed merger, the larger must be any efficiencies for it to raise social welfare. We...
Joséphine Gantois, Anouch Missirian, Evelina Linnros, Anna Tompsett, Amir Jina, Gordon C. McCord, and Eyal Frank
Monitoring systems for disaster prevention are costly, and measuring benefits is difficult when monitoring effort is endogenous. We provide the first causal estimate of one such system’s impact using three decades of desert locust monitoring data. We document conflict-induced interruptions...
Captivating and informative videos on the latest insights and trends as well as the tested stock of knowledge in economics from leaders in academia, policy, business, and the media.
A decision maker is averse to not knowing a prior over a set of restricted structured models (ambiguity) and suspects that each structured model is misspecified. The decision maker evaluates intertemporal plans under all of the structured models and, to recognize possible misspecifications, under unstructured alternatives that are statistically close to them. Likelihood ratio processes are used to represent unstructured alternative models, while relative entropy restricts a set of unstructured models. A set of structured models might be finite or indexed by a finite-dimensional vector of unknown parameters that could vary in unknown ways over time. We model such a decision maker with a dynamic version of variational preferences and revisit topics including dynamic consistency and admissibility.
The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...
Inspired by our namesakes, Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who believed that economics research could help improve the world, BFI works with the Chicago Economics community to turn its evidence-based research into real-world impact.
The Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) is intended to serve as a bridge between college and graduate school for students interested in empirical economics. The program offers unique research and professional training opportunities at the University of Chicago.
Expanding Discovery in Economics+ (EDE+) brings together a diverse group of early undergraduate students to hone their research abilities and technical skills.
Al-Mahdi Ebsim, Chen Lian, Yueran Ma, Pablo Ottonello, and Diego J. Perez
In traditional macro-finance models, firms’ debt contracts impose hard borrowing constraints, which require indiscriminate reductions of borrowing and investment when adverse shocks tighten these limits, giving rise to financial acceleration. We study the macroeconomic implications of “sophisticated borrowing constraints” akin...
Robert D. Metcalfe, Alexandre B. Sollaci, and Chad Syverson
Mergers are commonly evaluated by weighing their expected market power effects against any efficiency gains they create. The larger the market power effect of a proposed merger, the larger must be any efficiencies for it to raise social welfare. We...
Joséphine Gantois, Anouch Missirian, Evelina Linnros, Anna Tompsett, Amir Jina, Gordon C. McCord, and Eyal Frank
Monitoring systems for disaster prevention are costly, and measuring benefits is difficult when monitoring effort is endogenous. We provide the first causal estimate of one such system’s impact using three decades of desert locust monitoring data. We document conflict-induced interruptions...
Captivating and informative videos on the latest insights and trends as well as the tested stock of knowledge in economics from leaders in academia, policy, business, and the media.
