Christian Hellwig

Christian Hellwig

Neoclassical economics
Nationality	German
Institution	Toulouse School of Economics
Field	Economic theory, Macroeconomics
Alma mater	London School of Economics
Contributions	public information in global games
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

Christian Hellwig is a German economic theorist and macroeconomist who did research in the field of global games. He is the editor of the Journal of Economic Theory.

Biography

Hellwig obtained a B.A. in Economics at the University of Lausanne in 1998, a M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics by the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Economics at LSE in 2002. He spent the last two years of his doctorate as a visiting scholar at MIT. He became an Assistant Professor at UCLA in 2002 and became a tenured associate professor in 2007. Hellwig took up the position of Associate Professor at Toulouse School of Economics in 2010 where he is currently employed. In addition to his academic position, Hellwig is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research since 2007 and became the editor of the Journal of Economic Theory in June 2008. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review since April 2007.

Research contribution

Hellwig studied the effects of exogenous and endogenous public information in global coordination games and showed that multiplicity of equilibria is restored under fairly general conditions.

Global coordination games belong to a subfield of game theory which started with the article by Morris and Shin (1998). Steven Morris and Hyun Song Shin considered a stylized currency crises model, in which traders observe the relevant fundamentals with small noise, and show that this leads to the selection of a unique equilibrium. This result is in stark contrast with models of complete information, which feature multiple equilibria. However, there are potential problems with this result due to the lack of a theory of prices in global coordination games (Atkeson, 2001).

Hellwig studied the effects of exogenous public information in global coordination games and showed that this may restore multiplicity under fairly general conditions (Hellwig, 2002). Hellwig et al.(2006) address the concern by Atkeson (2001) by considering a more explicit market structure and model the public information endogenously as an interest rate signal. They show that equilibrium multiplicity may be restored by the endogenous public signal, provided that private information is sufficiently precise, which coincides with the findings by Angeletos and Werning (2006).

Sources

• George-Marios Angeletos, Christian Hellwig, and Alessandro Pavan (2006), "Signaling in a Global Game: Coordination and Policy Traps," Journal of Political Economy, 114 (3), 452-484.
• George-Marios Angeletos, Christian Hellwig, and Alessandro Pavan (2007), "Dynamic Global Games of Regime Change: Learning, Multiplicity and Timing of Attacks," Econometrica, 75 (3): 711-756.
• George-Marios Angeletos and Ivan Werning (2006), "Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity, and Volatility," American Economic Review, 96 (5): 1720–36.
• Andrew G. Atkeson, (2001), "Rethinking Multiple Equilibria in Macroeconomic Modeling: Comment." In NBER Macroeconomics Annual

2000, ed. Ben S. Bernanke and Kenneth Rogoff, 162–71. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Christian Hellwig (2002), "Public Information, Private Information, and the Multiplicity of Equilibria in Coordination Games," Journal of Economic Theory, 107 (2): 191-222.
• Christian Hellwig, Arijit Mukherji and Aleh Tsyvinski (2006), "Self-Fulfilling Currency Crises: The Role of Interest Rates," American Economic Review, 96 (5): 1769-1787.
• Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin (1998), "Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling Currency Attacks," American Economic Review, 88 (3): 587–97.

External links

• Webpage at TSE
• Curriculum Vitae

Persondata
Name	Hellwig, Christian
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death