Overconfidence can have important economic consequences, but has received little direct testing within the discipline. We test for overconfidence in forecasts of own absolute or relative performance in two unfamiliar experimental tasks. Given their choice of effort at the tasks, participants...

This paper tests whether changes in 'incidental emotions' lead to changes in economic choices. Incidental emotions are experienced at the time of an economic decision but are not part of the payoff from a particular choice. As such, the standard economic model predicts that incidental emotions...

It is common practice to evaluate fixed-event forecast revisions in macroeconomics by regressing current revisions on one-period lagged revisions. Under weak-form efficiency, the correlation between the current and one-period lagged revisions should be zero. The empirical findings in the...

Inflation has proven to be an important obstacle to successful economic adjustment in many countries. Despite both internal and external shocks to the economy, Mozambique has succeeded in controlling the inflation to gain high economic growth. This paper provides an econometric analysis of the...

The Target imbalances within the Eurozone can be interpreted as a sign of a missing balance of payments adjustment mechanism for the member countries. As the Eurozone lacks a fiscal union, in economic theory it is more an exchange rate union or a system of fixed exchange rates than a monetary...

I consider a gamble where the sum of the distributed payoffs is proportionate to the number of participants. I show that no subset of the population can agree to participate in the bet, if the size of the group is commonly known. Repeated announcements of the number of the participants leads the...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fash-ion and financial market...

One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading...

This classroom experiment introduces students to the notion of credit risk by allowing them to trade on comparable corporate bond issues from two types of markets - investment-grade and high-yield. Investment-grade issues have a lower probability of default than high-yield issues, and thus...

A number of competing social preference models have been developed inspired by the evidence from economic experiments. We test the relative performance of some of these models using an experimental design that is aimed at capturing pure distributional concerns in a multi-person setting. We find...