Emergency Preparation and Uncertainty Persistence
提出一个基于关注度不足的理论框架，解释为何罕见事件会引发持续的不确定性，并匹配金融市场的波动率、交易量等数据模式。
Unusual events trigger persistent spikes in uncertainty. Standard models cannot match these dynamic patterns. This paper presents a unified framework, motivated by the literature on inattention. Agents choose whether and how to prepare for different possible states of the world by collecting information. Agents optimally ignore sufficiently unlikely events, so the occurrence of such events does not resolve, but rather increases, uncertainty. Uncertain agents have dispersed beliefs, making it harder to focus future preparation. Thus, uncertainty begets uncertainty for an inattentive agent, endogenously persisting. In a financial application, this framework matches patterns in volatility, volume of trade, belief dispersion, and spreads. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Supplemental Material: The data file is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4836 .