The types of investments a ï¬rm undertakes will depend in part on what it expects the outcome of those investments to reveal about its skills, capabilities, and assets (i.e., its resources). We predict that a ï¬rm will specialize when young, then experiment in a new line of business for some...

This paper explains why seemingly irrational overconfident behavior can persist. Information aggregation is poor in groups in which most individuals herd. By ignoring the herd, the actions of overconfident individuals (“entrepreneursâ€) convey their private information. However,...

We examine the welfare effects of costly information acquistion in a version of the Grossman-Stiglitz (1980) exchange economy in which all traders are fully rational. We find, as emphasized by Hirschleifer, that information gathering leads the suboptimal risk sharing. Furthermore, information...

This paper examines how private information affects trading volume, the information content of trading volume data, and if there are any relations between trading volume and price changes which can be explained by informational differences. We develop a model with two trading periods in which...

This paper offers a new approach for pricing options on assets with stochastic volatility. We start by taking as given the prices of a few simple, liquid European options. More specifically, we take as given the “surface†of Black-Scholes implied volatilities for European options with...

We develop an estimation method for the Diagonal Multivariate GARCH model. For a vector of size N unidimensional GARCH processes for the diagonal elements of the conditional covariance matrix, and N(N-1)/2 bivariate GARCH processes for the off-diagonal elements of the conditional covariance...

We study a rational expectation model of bubbles and crashes. The model has two components: (1) our key assumption is that a crash may be caused by local self-reinforcing imitation between noise traders. If the tendency for noise traders to imitate their nearest neighbors increases up to a...

We develop an estimation method for the Diagonal Multivariate GARCH model. For a vector of size N unidimensional GARCH processes for the diagonal elements of the conditional covariance matrix, and N(N-1)/2 bivariate GARCH processes for the off-diagonal elements of the conditional covariance...

This paper offers a novel explanation for why some firms prefer to pay dividends rather than repurchase shares. It is well-known that institutional investors are relatively less taxed than individual investors, and that this induces "dividend clientele" effects. We argue that these clientele...

We model a run on a financial market, in which each risk-neutral investor fears having to liquidate shares after a run, but before prices can recover back to fundamental values. To avoid having to possibly liquidate shares at the marginal post-run price - in which case the risk-averse...