An agent optimizes over real investment and investment in information acquisition while maximizing a two-period utility that captures his ordinal certainty equivalent (OCE) preferences. Optimal investment is characterized and the impact of risk and time preferences on it is investigated

The continuous growth of house prices in Spain in recent years has been an issue with economists and market participants. It is still an issue of debate whether the increases are based in fundamentals or whether they essentially constitute a bubble. In this work we study and document the price...

This paper introduces state dependent utility into the standard Mehra and Prescott (1985) economy by allowing the representative agent's coefficient of relative risk aversion to vary with the underlying economy's growth rate. Existence of equilibrium is proved and its asymptotic properties...

The US housing market has experienced significant cyclical volatility over the last twenty-five years due to major structural changes and economic fluctuations. In addition, the housing market is generally considered to be weak form inefficient. Houses are relatively illiquid, exceptionally...

The ability of monetary policy to affect long-term interest rates is of central importance for economics and finance. Several recent studies have shown that long-term interest rates are virtually unaffected by monetary policy. This paper develops a statistical methodology to identify the...

Since the mid-1980s firm level financial volatility has increased, while the U.S. economy has experienced a sharp decline in the volatility of GDP growth. Do firms adjust their capital structure in response to higher idiosyncratic risk? And if so, could that affect the performance of the...

The paper examines intra-day share price volatility over the year 2000 for five market centres: the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, the London Stock Exchange, Euronext Paris and Deutsche Borse. In each of these markets, we observe a U-shaped intraday volatility pattern, a particularly sharp...