We use data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to compare point predictions of gross domestic product (GDP) growth and inflation with the subjective probability distributions held by forecasters. We find that most SPF point predictions are quite close to the central tendencies of...

We use the popular television show <i>Mad Money</i>, hosted by Jim Cramer, to test theories of attention and limits to arbitrage. Stock recommendations on <i>Mad Money</i> constitute attention shocks to a large audience of individual traders. We find that stock recommendations lead to large overnight returns...

We use data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to compare point forecasts of GDP growth and inflation with the subjective probability distributions held by forecasters. We find that SPF forecasters summarize their underlying distributions in different ways and that their summaries tend...

We introduce a bidding strategy which allows the seller to extract the full surplus of the high bidder in eBay auctions. We call this a "Discover-and-Stop" bidding strategy and estimate that 1.39 percent of all bids in eBay auctions are placed by sellers (or accomplices) who execute this...

We find that a substantial portion of short sellers' trading advantage comes from their ability to analyze publicly available information. Using a database of short sales combined with a database of news releases, we show that the well-documented negative relation between short sales and future...

We use exogenous scheduling of Wall Street Journal columnists to identify a causal relation between financial reporting and stock market performance. To measure the media's unconditional effect, we add columnist fixed effects to a daily regression of excess Dow Jones Industrial Average returns....

Using detailed publication and citation data for over 50,000 articles from 30 major economics and finance journals, we investigate whether network proximity to an editor influences research productivity. During an editor's tenure, his current university colleagues publish about 100% more papers...

Edlund and Korn [2002] (EK) proposed that prostitutes are well paid and that the wage premium reflects foregone marriage market opportunities. However, studies of street prostitution in the U.S. have revealed only modest wages and considerable risks of disease and violence, casting doubt on...