The booms and busts in U.S. stock prices over the post-war period can to a large extent be explained by fluctuations in investors` subjective capital gains expectations. Survey measures of these expectations display excessive optimism at market peaks and excessive pessimism at market throughs....

This paper provides an empirical test of the scapegoat theory of exchange rates (Bacchetta and van Wincoop 2004, 2011), as an attempt to evaluate its potential for explaining the poor empirical performance of traditional exchange rate models. This theory suggests that market participants may at...

This paper summarises the results of a survey of UK based foreign exchange dealers conducted in 1998. It addresses topics in three main areas: The microeconomic operation of the foreign exchange market; the beliefs of dealers regarding the importance, or otherwise, of macroeconomic fundamental...

This paper analyzes the sources of the differential beliefs of market participants in the foreign exchange market and their relative role in forming exchange rate expectations. We find that there are distinct periods of high and low dispersion and document that dispersion arises because of a...

To check hyperinflation, Argentina pegged the peso at one US dollar in 1991. This stopped inflation in its tracks: but, with the rise of the dollar against the Euro and the substantial devaluation of the Brazilian real, the peso became increasingly over-valued leading to a significant...

Using a portfolio balance model of exchange rate determination, this paper develops a theoretical explanation of why central banks do not make precise announcements of their exchange rate targets. In foreign exchange markets, where it is common knowledge that the central bank intervenes to...

Using data from the 1981 Family Expenditure Survey we estimate a logit model for the choice between unemployment and employment, using explanatory variables such as tax and social security benefit rates. Other variables represent the characteristics of the households in the survey and...

This paper examines the validity of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates by means of a previously unexploited dataset of market expectations that covers a broad range of EMS versus non-EMS foreign currency deposits. Although we find strong evidence in favour of...

The paper is concerned with the empirical modelling of domestic demand for energy in the United Kingdom at the level of the individual household (most previous British work has used aggregate time-series data). The paper develops a two-stage budgeting model of the household's demand for energy...

Does time-varying business volatility affect the price setting of firms and thus the transmission of monetary policy into the real economy? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German IFO Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the...