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Beauty Contests and Irrational Exuberance: A Neoclassical Approach

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  • George-Marios Angeletos
  • Guido Lorenzoni
  • Alessandro Pavan

Abstract

The arrival of new, unfamiliar, investment opportunities is often associated with "exuberant" movements in asset prices and real economic activity. During these episodes of high uncertainty, financial markets look at the real sector for signals about the profitability of the new investment opportunities, and vice versa. In this paper, we study how such information spillovers impact the incentives that agents face when making their real economic decisions. On the positive front, we find that the sensitivity of equilibrium outcomes to noise and to higher-order uncertainty is amplified, exacerbating the disconnect from fundamentals. On the normative front, we find that these effects are symptoms of constrained inefficiency; we then investigate policies that can improve welfare in our model without any informational advantage on the government's part. At the heart of these results is a distortion that induces a conventional neoclassical economy to behave as a Keynesian "beauty contest" and to exhibit fluctuations that may look like "irrational exuberance" to an outside observer.

Suggested Citation

  • George-Marios Angeletos & Guido Lorenzoni & Alessandro Pavan, 2010. "Beauty Contests and Irrational Exuberance: A Neoclassical Approach," NBER Working Papers 15883, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15883
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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • E20 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

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