Der Bericht stellt den Wirtschaftsnobelpreis 1995 für Robert E. Lucas zur Diskussion. Dabei wird die Entwicklung der Forschungsinhalte des Preisträgers gewürdigt. Bekanntgeworden ist Robert Lucas in den siebziger Jahren neben der Übertragung der rationalen Erwartungen auf die Makroökonomik...

We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes with and without trading by a privately informed 'monopolistic' insider, in a model with real investment portfolio choices ex ante, and noise trading generated by aggregate uncertainty regarding other agents' intertemporal consumption preferences. The...

In an earlier paper "Granger-causality and Policy Effectiveness" Economica (1984), I showed that for a policy instrument x to Granger-cause some target variable y it is not necessary for x to be useful in controlling y. (The argument that it is not sufficient was already familiar, e.g. from the...

This paper offers an informational explanation for asset price booms and crashes. If market fundamentals change, but the length of this process of change is unknown, market participants try to learn about it by observing market outcomes. This learning generates a boom and a crash, which we call...

A model of profits switches between four regimes with fixed probabilities; the rationally expected profits stream implies the stock market value. This efficient market model is not rejected by UK post-war time-series behaviour of either profits or the FTSE index.

Dynamic inconsistency provides a theoretical basis for discussions of policy credibility: when the government cannot commit its future policies, the incentive to deviate from the 'optimal' plan renders it incredible. We derive the best policy in the absence of precommitment as the feedback Nash...

We study the implications of conformism among analysts in a CARA Gaussian model of the market for a risky asset, where a trader's in- formation is a message sent by an analyst. Conformism increases the weight of the public information in the messages, decreasing their in- formativeness. More...

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual postwar sample data, but not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities - the peso problem -, can effect the equilibrium behavior of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To...

This paper investigates the determinants of skyscraper building cycles in Manhattan from 1895 to 2004. We first provide a simple model of the market for tall buildings. Then we empirically estimate the determinants of the time series of the number of skyscraper completions and their average...