A central assumption in public finance is that individuals optimize fully with respect to the incentives created by tax policies. In this paper, we test this assumption using two empirical strategies. First, we conducted an experiment at a grocery store where we posted tax-inclusive prices for 750 products subject to sales tax for a three week period. Using scanner data, we find that posting tax-inclusive prices reduced demand by roughly 8 percent among the treated products relative to control products and stores. Second, we find that state-level increases in excise taxes (which are included in posted prices) reduce aggregate alcohol consumption signi…cantly more than increases in sales taxes (which are added at the register and hence less salient). Both sets of results indicate that tax salience a¤ects behavioral responses. We propose a bounded rationality model to explain why salience matters, and show that it matches our evidence as well as several additional stylized facts. In the model, agents incur second-order (small) utility losses from ignoring some taxes, even though these taxes have first-order (large) effects on social welfare and government revenue. Using this theoretical framework, we develop elasticity-based formulas for the efficiency cost and incidence of commodity taxes when agents do not optimize fully.

in the eCB’s main refinanCing operations during the finanCial

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Monetary economics as practiced by central bank modelers has made a great deal of progress in recent years. In a 2002 paper I interviewed research economists at four central banks and surveyed the models in use at those banks. I criticized the models for having lost all touch with statistical inference and with its connection

Abstract: This paper assesses both the support for and the properties of informational rigidities faced by agents. Specifically, we track the impulse responses of mean forecast errors and disagreement among agents after exogenous structural shocks. Our key contribution is to document that in response to structural shocks, mean forecasts fail to completely adjust on impact, leading to statistically and economically significant deviations from the null of full information: the half life of forecast errors is roughly between 6 months and a year. Importantly, the dynamic process followed by forecast errors following structural shocks is consistent with the predictions of models of informational rigidities. We interpret this finding as providing support for the recent expansion of research into models of informational rigidities. In addition, we document several stylized facts about the conditional responses of forecast errors and disagreement among agents that can be used to differentiate between some of the models of informational rigidities recently proposed. We use a variety of structural shocks, expectation surveys, and robustness checks to establish these facts about informational rigidities.

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Few studies have successfully examined the empirical impact of limited information processing on real economic variables. The challenge relies, of course, on the difficulty of measuring an economic agent’s degree of attention/inattention paid to different types of information. This paper overcomes such challenge exploring a unique dataset containing the “search/click-through” behavior of internet search engine users. We analyzes the effect of attention allocation on international investment decisions by combining U.S. data on portfolio holdings of foreign securities with the attention allocated by 657,426 America Online customers in search queries towards these countries. We find evidence that: (i) agents tend to search more information about countries in which they hold more assets, and (ii) agents tend to invest more in countries where they process more information.

Individuals must often choose among discrete alternatives with imperfect information about their values. Before choosing, they may have an opportunity to study the options, but doing so is costly. This costly information acquisition creates new choices such as the number of and types of questions to ask. We model these situations using the rational inattention approach to information frictions. We find that the decision maker’s optimal strategy results in choosing probabilistically in line with a modified multinomial logit model. The modification arises because the decision maker’s prior knowledge and attention allocation strategy affect his evaluation of the alternatives. When the options are a priori homogeneous, the standard logit model emerges.

The literature applying information-theoretic ideas to economics has so far considered only Gaussian uncertainty. Ex post Gaussian uncertainty can be justified as optimal when the associated optimization problem is linear-quadratic, but the literature has often assumed Gaussian uncertainty even where it cannot be justified as optimal. This paper considers a simple two-period optimal saving problem with a Shannon capacity constraint and non-quadratic utility. It derives an optimal ex post probability density for wealth in two leading cases (log and linear utility) and lays out a general approach for handling other cases numerically. It displays and discusses numerical solutions for other utility functions, and considers the feasibility of extending this paper's approaches to general non-LQ dynamic programming problems. The introduction of the paper discusses approaches that have been taken in the existing literature to applying Shannon capacity to economic modeling, making criticisms and suggesting promising directions for further progress.

Bank of Canada working papers are theoretical or empirical works-in-progress on subjects in economics and finance. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author. No responsibility for them should be attributed to the Bank of Canada.