Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as "information markets," "idea futures" or "event futures", are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts. This article summarizes...

As is becoming increasingly widely known, mutual funds often calculate their net asset values using stale prices, which causes their daily returns to be predictable. By trading on this predictability, investors can earn 35-70 percent per year in international funds and 10-25 percent in asset...

Firms and individuals who sell opinions may bias their reports for either behavioral or strategic reasons. This paper proposes a methodology for measuring these biases, particularly whether opinion producers under or over emphasize their private information, i.e. whether they herd or exaggerate...

This paper exploits nationalistic biases in Olympic winter sport judging to study the problem of designing a decision making process that uses the input of potentially biased agents. Judges score athletes from their own countries higher than other judges do, and they appear to vary their biases...

We analyze the extent to which simple markets can be used to aggregate disperse information into efficient forecasts of uncertain future events. Drawing together data from a range of prediction contexts, we show that market-generated forecasts are typically fairly accurate, and that they...

What do Financial Markets Think of War in Iraq?

This paper uses daily fund flow data to examine the extent of late trading in the mutual fund industry. Using data from a 10-15 percent subsample of the industry, I find annual long-term shareholder losses due to late trading of about 5 basis points in international equity funds and 0.6 basis...