Do asset prices aggregate investors’ private information about the ability of financial analysts? We show that as financial analysts become reputable, the market can get trapped: Investors optimally choose to ignore their private information, and blindly follow analyst recommendations. As time...

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then...

Extreme adverse selection arises when private information has unbounded support, and market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only equilibrium outcome. We study extreme adverse selection via the limit behavior of a financial market as the support of private information converges to an...

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the...

What determines how trade in a commodity is divided between privately negotiated transactions via "middle men" (dealer/brokers) in a telephone or "dealer market" versus transactions via "market makers" (specialists) at publicly observable bid/ask prices? To address this question, we extend...

The information contained in the forecasts from two econometric models can be compared by regressing the actual change in the variable forecasted on the two forecasts of the change. We do such comparisons in this paper, where the forecasts are based only on information through the period prior...

Was the Depression forecastable? After the Crash, how long did it take contemporary economic forecasters to realize how severe the downturn was going to be? How long should it have taken them to come to this realization? These questions are addressed by studying the predictions of the Harvard...

In continuous time specifications, the prices of interest rate derivative securities depend crucially on the mean reversion parameter of the associated interest rate diffusion equation. This parameter is well known to be subject to estimation bias when standard methods like maximum likelihood...