Placebo Reforms
研究了政策制定者在公众有限理性下如何策略性地选择改革时机，发现他们倾向于在危机时行动、行动时规避风险，并偏好能产生永久性噪音的干预措施。
I study a dynamic model of strategic reform decisions that potentially affect the stochastic evolution of a publicly observed economic variable. Policy makers maximize their evaluation by a boundedly rational public. Specifically, the public follows a rule that attributes recent changes to the most recent intervention. I analyze subgame perfect equilibrium in this model when the economic variable follows a linear growth trend with noise. Equilibrium is essentially unique and stationary, bearing a subtle formal relation to optimal search models. Policy makers tend to act during crises, display risk aversion conditional on acting, and prefer interventions that induce permanent noise.