We develop a new methodology to estimate the importance of herd behavior in financial markets: we build a structural model of informational herding that can be estimated with financial transaction data. In the model, rational herding arises because of information-event uncertainty. We estimate...

The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich, a large increase in leverage for the remainder, and an eventual financial...

The Brazilian agricultural sector is characterized by a great diversity of production systems subject to a wide number of risk factors. These risks cannot be completely eliminated, but they can be minimized by the adoption of some strategies, such as diversification of agricultural and livestock...

Building on the widely-used double-lognormal approach by Bahra (1997), this paper presents a multi-lognormal approach with restrictions to extract risk-neutral probability density functions (RNPs) for various asset classes. The contributions are twofold: first, on the technical side, the paper...

This paper studies the political influence of individual firms on Congressional decisions to suspend tariffs on U.S. imports of intermediate goods. We develop a model in which firms influence the government by transmitting information about the value of protection, via costless messages...

The study presents an analysis of the information content of IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) indicators. There are significant differences in the quantity of information between DQAF dimensions and sub-dimensions. The most informative DQAF dimension is accessibility,...

In this paper ambiguity aversion is measured through the maximum price the decision maker is willing to pay in order to know the probability of an event. Two comparative problems are examined in which the decision maker faces an act: in one case buying information implies playing a lottery,...

Players cooperate in experiments more than game theory would predict. We introduce the ‘returns-based beliefs’ approach: the expected returns of a particular strategy in proportion to total expected returns of all strategies. Using a decision analytic solution concept, Luce’s (1959)...