About

Kristoffer Nimark is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Cornell University, located in Uris Hall, Room 454. He earned his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in 2005. His academic interests include macroeconomics, finance, and information economics. Nimark is involved in teaching courses such as Money and Credit, Macroeconomics II, and Applied Bayesian Time Series Methods, and participates in the S. C. Tsiang Macroeconomics Workshop. His research focuses on macroeconomic and financial topics, contributing to the understanding of economic dynamics and information processing within financial markets.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Industrial organization
• Chemistry
• Natural resource economics
• Marketing
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Physics

Selected publications

• Endogenous Production Networks Under Supply Chain Uncertainty

  Econometrica · 2024 · 52 citations

  • Economics
  • Microeconomics
  • Industrial organization

  Supply chain disturbances can lead to substantial increases in production costs. To mitigate these risks, firms may take steps to reduce their reliance on volatile suppliers. We construct a model of endogenous network formation to investigate how these decisions affect the structure of the production network and the level and volatility of macroeconomic aggregates. When uncertainty increases in the model, producers prefer to purchase from more stable suppliers, even though they might sell at higher prices. The resulting reorganization of the network tends to reduce macroeconomic volatility, but at the cost of a decline in aggregate output. The model also predicts that more productive and stable firms have higher Domar weights—a measure of their importance as suppliers—in the equilibrium network. We provide a basic calibration of the model using U.S. data to evaluate the importance of these mechanisms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Endogenous Production Networks under Uncertainty

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Natural resource economics
  PublisherDOI

• News media and delegated information choice

  Journal of Economic Theory · 2019-02-10 · 72 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  No agent has the resources to monitor all events that are potentially relevant for his decisions. Therefore, many delegate their information choice to specialized news providers that monitor the world on their behalf and report only a curated selection of events. We document empirically that, while different outlets typically emphasize different topics, major events shift the general news focus and make coverage more homogeneous. We propose a theoretical framework that formalizes this type of state-dependent editorial behavior by introducing news selection functions. We prove that (i) agents can always reduce the entropy of their posterior beliefs by delegating their information choice, (ii) state-dependent reporting conveys information not only via the contents of a story, but also via the decision of what to report, and (iii) an event that is reported by all news providers is common knowledge among agents only if it is also considered maximally newsworthy by all providers. As an application, we embed delegated news selection into a simple beauty-contest model to demonstrate how it affects actions in a setting with strategic interactions.

  PublisherDOI

• Sectoral Media Focus and Aggregate Fluctuations

  American Economic Review · 2019-01-01 · 22 citations

  preprintOpen access

  We formalize the editorial role of news media in a multisector economy and show that media can be an independent source of business cycle fluctuations, even when they report accurate information. Public reporting about a subset of sectoral developments that are newsworthy but unrepresentative causes firms across all sectors to hire too much or too little labor. We construct historical measures of US sectoral news coverage and use them to calibrate our model. Time-varying media focus generates demand-like fluctuations that are orthogonal to productivity, even in the absence of non-TFP shocks. Presented with historical sectoral productivity, the model reproduces the 2009 Great Recession. (JEL D22, D83, E32, L82)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inattention and belief polarization

  Journal of Economic Theory · 2019-01-03 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inattention and Belief Polarization

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2018-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Disagreement persists over issues that have objective truths. In the presence of increasing amounts of data, such disagreement should vanish, but it is nonetheless observable. This paper studies persistent disagreement in a model where rational Bayesian agents learn about an unobservable state of the world through noisy signals. We show that agents (i) choose signal structures that are more likely to reinforce their prior beliefs and (ii) choose less informative signals when their prior beliefs are more precise. For sufficiently precise beliefs, agents choose completely uninformative signals. We call the former the confirmation effect and the latter the complacency effect. Taken together, the two effects imply that the beliefs of ex ante identical agents over time can cluster in two distinct groups at opposite ends of the belief space. The complacency effect holds uniformly when information cost is proportional to channel capacity, but not when cost is proportional to reduction in entropy.

  Publisher

• Speculation and the Bond Market: An Empirical No-Arbitrage Framework

  Management Science · 2018-07-18 · 2 citations

  preprintSenior author

  An affine no-arbitrage asset pricing framework is developed that allows for agents to have rational but heterogeneous expectations. The framework can match both bond yields and the observed dispersion of yield expectations in survey data. Heterogeneous information introduces a speculative component in bond prices that is (i) statistically distinct from classical components such as risk premia and expectations about future short rates and (ii) quantitatively important, at times accounting for up to 125 basis points of U.S. yields. Allowing for heterogeneous expectations also changes the estimated relative importance of risk premia and expectations about future short rates in historical bond yields compared to a standard affine model. The framework imposes weaker restrictions than existing heterogeneous information asset pricing models and is thus well suited to empirically quantify the importance of relaxing the common information assumption. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance.

  PublisherDOI

• Speculation and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

  Review of Financial Studies · 2017-06-10 · 20 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  We develop and estimate a tractable equilibrium term structure model populated with rational but heterogeneously informed traders that take on speculative positions to exploit what they perceive to be inaccurate market expectations about future bond prices. The speculative motive is an important driver of trading volume. Yield dynamics due to speculation are (1) statistically distinct from classical term structure components due to risk premiums and expectations about future short rates and are orthogonal to public information available to traders in real time and (2) quantitatively important, accounting for a substantial fraction of the variation of long maturity U.S. bond yields. Received May 12, 2014; editorial decision May 10, 2016 by Editor Pietro Veronesi.

  PublisherDOI

• Speculation and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Delegated information choice

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2016-06-01 · 2 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  News media provide an editorial service for their audiences by monitoring a large number of events and by selecting the most newsworthy of these to report. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model to classify news articles, we document the editorial function of US newspapers. We find that, while different newspapers on average tend to emphasize different topics, news coverage becomes more homogenous across newspapers after major events. We propose a theoretical model that can match these facts. In the model, agents delegate the choice of what to get information about to specialized providers that condition on ex post outcomes before deciding what to report. Because what different information providers choose to report is state dependent, the degree to which information about a given event is common among agents is endogenous and depends both on agents' preferences and the distribution of possible events. If agents have a strategic motive, they respond more strongly to events that they can infer are closer to common knowledge. Because different providers in some states of the world choose to report the same event, agents' actions are more correlated compared to a model in which agents choose ex ante what to get information about.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Jarkko Jääskelä

  13 shared

• Francisco Barillas

  UNSW Sydney

  8 shared

• Hugo Gerard

  Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg

  8 shared

• Stefan Pitschner

  Queens College, CUNY

  7 shared

• Ryan Chahrour

  Cornell University

  3 shared

• Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel

  Cornell University

  2 shared

• Savitar Sundaresan

  Imperial College London

  2 shared

• Bineet Mishra

  Cornell University

  2 shared