Essays on sticky information and on bank lending channel

One of the most important structural relationships for policy makers is the Phillips curve; as a result, there is an extensive literature focused on its properties, proposing alternative theoretical approaches and different strategies for its estimation. The Mankiw and Reis (2002) proposal of sticky information about macroeconomic conditions has become an alternative to sticky price models regarding the treatment of information, the estimation of the Phillips curve, and a set up in general equilibrium models for evaluating monetary policy. In Essay One, I estimate a sticky information Phillips curve for each OECD country following Khan and Zhu (2006) and document the period of time that firms need to update their information set. I find evidence that in countries with higher inflation, higher inflation volatility, or higher output gap volatility, the degree of information stickiness is lower. This evidence suggests a degree of endogeneity of the slope of the Phillips curve which is consistent with state-contingent inflation processes.;The slope of the sticky information Phillips curve is based on the degree of information rigidity on the part of the firms. Carroll (2003) uses an epidemiology model of expectations and finds evidence for the U.S. of a one year lag in the transmission of information from professional forecasters to households. Using financial institutions and firms' survey data from Peru and the model proposed by Carroll, in Essay Two, I estimate the degree of information rigidity. This essay also considers heterogeneous responses and explores the cross-section dimension of these survey forecasts. I find that the degree of information stickiness ranges between one and three quarters, a result that is robust to different specifications.;In the past decade, the Peruvian economy has experienced important structural changes regarding monetary policy. Those changes have affected the effectiveness of central bank's mechanisms of transmissions. The Essay Three objectives of are the identification of the bank lending channel as part of the transmission process to economic activity based on Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1996) flight-to-quality argument and the evaluation of its effectiveness for transmission. For identification, I use a panel of bank level data, and for effectiveness, I use structural VARs in which two scenarios are considered: (i) with an operating bank lending channel and (ii) without this channel. I conclude that the bank lending channel has operated but this channel is not important as a mechanism of transmission to macroeconomic activity.