National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
To encourage, grow, and further strengthen research on behavioral macroeconomics by providing doctoral fellowships and training support to early-career scholars
Over the past 30 years, behavioral economists have succeeded in cataloging an impressive number of cognitive “biases” that manifest in how individuals make economic decisions. These describe how real people defy the assumptions made about them in economic models. The big idea is that these biases are uniform enough across decision-makers that they can be incorporated into standard economic models, rendering the models both more accurate and more robustly predictive. Behavioral macroeconomics is a growing field that seeks to incorporate these insights about human biases into attempts to model whole economies in a more realistic way. Funds from this grant support a fellowship program run by Yuriy Gorodnichenko at the National Bureau of Economic Research that provides stipends to early career economists interested in conducting research in behavioral macroeconomics. In addition to supporting the work of two fellows per year, Gorodnichenko runs an intensive every-other-summer “boot camp” to introduce new economics scholars to the concepts, methods, models and findings of behavior macroeconomics. Topics addressed in the boot camp include the scarcity of attention, decision-making under incomplete information; the formation of expectations; optimal policy design in the presence of informational frictions; and interactions among agents with different levels of knowledge.