Standard Fama-French and Carhart models produce economically and statistically significant nonzero alphas even for passive benchmark indices such as the Samp;P 500 and Russell 2000. We find that these alphas primarily arise from the disproportionate weight the Fama-French factors place on small...

Event studies have been used to address a variety of political questions|from the economic e ffects of party control of government to the importance of complex rules in congressional committees. However, the results of event studies are notoriously sensitive to both choices made by researchers...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as quot;information markets,quot; quot;idea futuresquot; or quot;event futuresquot;, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts....

We analyze the extent to which simple markets can be used to aggregate disperse information into efficient forecasts of uncertain future events. Drawing together data from a range of prediction contexts, we show that market-generated forecasts are typically fairly accurate, and that they...

We analyze financial market data in order to produce an ex-ante assessment of the economic consequences of war with Iraq. The novel feature of our analysis derives from the existence of a market for quot;Saddam Securities,quot; a new future traded on an online betting exchange that pays only if...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as quot;information markets,quot; quot;idea futuresquot; or quot;event futuresquot;, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts....

While most empirical analysis of prediction markets treats prices of binary options as predictions of the probability of future events, Manski (2004) has recently argued that there is little existing theory supporting this practice. We provide relevant analytic foundations, describing sufficient...

Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as quot;information marketsquot;, quot;idea futuresquot; or quot;event futuresquot;, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts....

The independence of editorial content from advertisers' influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. We test whether this independence is observed in practice. We find that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal finance publications but not in...