主讲人：霍震 耶鲁大学助理教授

主持人：罗俊 浙江财经大学经济学院副院长

时间：2022年9月8日（周四）14:00

地点：

线下：经济学院（6号学院楼）210会议室

线上：腾讯会议ID 780-534-741

讲座主题：

Information Frictions and News Media in Global Value Chains

【内容摘要】

We introduce information frictions into a tractable quantitative multi-country multi-sector model with global value chains. Producers in a sector do not perfectly observe contemporaneous shocks to other countries and sectors, and their output decisions respond to their idiosyncratic beliefs about worldwide productivity innovations. We discipline agents' information sets with new quarterly data containing the frequencies of country-industry-specific economic news reports by 11 leading newspapers in the G7 plus Spain. Newspapers in each country publish articles on select events in both domestic and partner-country sectors, and not every event is reported worldwide. We show that (i) greater news coverage is associated with smaller GDP forecast errors by professional forecasters; (ii) the dispersion of forecast errors shrinks with higher news coverage; and (iii) sectors more covered in the news exhibit stronger hours growth synchronization, and more so if they trade more with each other. We use these reduced form facts to discipline the key parameters in the new theory—the precision of the vectors of public and private signals about country-sector productivities. We find that (i) imperfect "news" about economic fundamentals can be a quantitatively important source of international fluctuations and (ii) the effects of information frictions are amplified by the global production network. These information frictions appear as correlated labor wedges in standard models without dispersed information.

【主讲人简介】

霍震(Zhen Huo)博士毕业于明尼苏达大学，现为耶鲁大学助理教授。主要研究方向是理论宏观和实证宏观，包括而不限于经济周期、信息摩擦和预期形成等主题。学术文章发表于经济学顶尖国际期刊American Economic Review（2篇）及理论经济学、宏观经济学、国际经济学等领域的顶尖期刊Journal of Economic Theory、NBER Macro Annual 、American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics、Review of Economic Dynamics（2篇）、 Journal of International Economics及经济学国内权威期刊《经济研究》（2篇）。