Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics - Hardcover

by George W. Evans (Author), Seppo Honkapohja (Author)

A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach.

Back Jacket

"This excellent book brings together and extends two decades of work on learning in self-referential equilibrium models in macroeconomics. The discussions presented by George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja are technically superb, well written, and well motivated in terms of content."--Thomas Sargent, Stanford University and Hoover Institution

"An important methodological and technical achievement that will set the standard against which all other macroeconomic learning analyses must be measured. Economists need to know how to analyze systems under the recursive learning assumption and what kind of results can be obtained. Evans and Honkapohja have fully worked out methods to analyze the resulting dynamics."--James Bullard, Assistant Vice President and Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Author Biography

George W. Evans is John B. Hamacher Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon and has held positions at the London School of Economics, Stanford University, and the University of Edinburgh. Seppo Honkapohja is Professor of Economics at the University of Helsinki, where he has currently been appointed Academy Professor. Professors Evans and Honkapohja have published extensively in economic journals, and each is best known for his respective research on expectations and learning in dynamic models. This book is the outgrowth of over fifteen years of collaboration between them.