We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes with and without trading by a privately informed 'monopolistic' insider, in a model with real investment portfolio choices ex ante, and noise trading generated by aggregate uncertainty regarding other agents' intertemporal consumption preferences. The...

In an earlier paper "Granger-causality and Policy Effectiveness" Economica (1984), I showed that for a policy instrument x to Granger-cause some target variable y it is not necessary for x to be useful in controlling y. (The argument that it is not sufficient was already familiar, e.g. from the...

This paper offers an informational explanation for asset price booms and crashes. If market fundamentals change, but the length of this process of change is unknown, market participants try to learn about it by observing market outcomes. This learning generates a boom and a crash, which we call...

This paper extends the work of Barro and Gordon (1983) to general linear models with rational expectations. We examine the question whether the optimal policy rule, i.e. the one that a government which could pre-commit itself would use, can be sustained as a consistent rule in the sense defined...

A model of profits switches between four regimes with fixed probabilities; the rationally expected profits stream implies the stock market value. This efficient market model is not rejected by UK post-war time-series behaviour of either profits or the FTSE index.

Dynamic inconsistency provides a theoretical basis for discussions of policy credibility: when the government cannot commit its future policies, the incentive to deviate from the 'optimal' plan renders it incredible. We derive the best policy in the absence of precommitment as the feedback Nash...

The banking crisis has caused a resurgence of interest in behavioural models of expectations in macroeconomics. Here we evaluate behavioural and rational expectations econometrically in a New Keynesian framework, using US post-war data and the method of indirect inference. We find that after...

We survey recent literature comparing inflation targeting (IT) and price-level targeting (PT) as macroeconomic stabilization policies. Our focus is on New Keynesian models and areas which have seen significant developments since Ambler’s (2009) survey: the zero lower bound on nominal interest...

We present a model of quantitative trading as an automated system under human supervision. Contrary to previous literature we show that price-contingent trading is the profitable equilibrium strategy of large rational agents in efficient markets. The key ingredient is uncertainty about whether a...

From a theory viewpoint, the use of auctions with zero public reserve prices also called absolute auctions, or the use of auctions with secret reserve prices is somehow puzzling despite being common. By allowing that buyers differ in their processing of past data regarding how the participation...