Using scanner data and product-level information, this paper documents the trend and the cyclicality of the processing level of market-purchased household food consumption over the period 2007 to 2020 in the United States. I identify a novel strategy, the processing effort, that households exploit to reduce the price of their basket. This strategy consists in altering their basket composition at business cycle frequencies to purchase less processed foods for which I uncover a lower price per unit. Several results emerge. First, the strategy is effective in reducing the price per unit of the household basket. Second, the strategy was used by households in both the Great and the Covid-19 recessions but varied in intensity across income groups consistently with the theory of the opportunity cost of time. Third, its nature allows to infer that home production is countercyclical which has implications for modelling the time allocation of households during economic downturns. Finally, I develop a tractable heterogeneous agent model (THANK) that reproduces the empirical evidence and reveals broader implications of the processing effort strategy including an amplification of the inflation reduction capacity of a monetary policy tightening.

Using individual-level data on trust in the European Central Bank, we study the association between inflation and the public's trust in the ECB. We find that inflation concern is important for understanding the link between inflation and central bank trust. Inflation is not directly linked to the public trust in the ECB but rather associated to it indirectly when it becomes a concern for survey respondents. We show that the public's inflation concern, although related to inflation attention, is only partly explained by it and is also a function of realized inflation.

Using variations in the human-annotated topic content of national and regional telecasts and individual-level macroeconomic expectations, I explore the link between aggregated daily news and household unemployment, inflation, and economic situation expectations in France. Beyond the information included in national statistics, household expectations embody news information on topics related to the state of the economy, such as deficit, living cost, and economic crisis. Inflation expectations additionally incorporate news on taxes, energy, and especially oil. Distinguishing regional from national television broadcasts reveals that household expectations incorporate both regional and national news, with news on local labor market conditions having a prominent role.

This paper relaxes the frequently adopted assumption of a frictionless market for robots in favor of a frictional market featuring firms that search for robot inventors with whom they match and bargain the robot price, and sheds light on its consequences in a structural model estimated for the US economy. A frictional robot market renders the diffusion of automation relatively rigid and persistent, with several implications. First, it relatively disconnects the labor market conditions from the robot market conditions and, thereby, weakens the labor displacement effect of automation and the automation threat. Second, it strengthens the present value of vacancies and, thereby, job creation and the volatility of labor market aggregates. Third, it renders aggregate productivity more sluggish. Under such a market, more than half of the fluctuations in the automation probability and the robot price stem from business-cycle forces.

This paper explores the impact of media, public policy and regional income and population density heterogeneity on renewable energy crowdfunding campaigns. I examine the effects of media-coverage and geographical restrictions on the number of participants of successful crowdfunding campaigns and their duration. I find that the higher the media coverage, the larger the number of investors. I uncover that using a combination of social and traditional media attracts more investors than using a single outlet. I show that an unintended energy policy consequence of geographically restricted is that campaigns are longer and involve fewer investors.

Contrary to the Great and other past US Recessions, the reduction in services consumption exceeds the decline in nondurables consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the drivers of this unprecedented phenomenon through the lens of an estimated multi-sector Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model that distinguishes between nondurables and services sectors. We find that economic uncertainty is once again important, but it does not generate sectoral heterogeneity. Demand-side factors reallocating consumption across sectors and proxying for voluntary and regulatory social distancing measures, as well as the lack of wage adjustments in services despite plummeting employment, became influential during the pandemic.