In repeated games, equilibrium often requires that any deviation be punished in the continuation, regardless of whether it is beneficial to the other players. It seems against the nature of non-cooperative game theory for the other players to decide what to do based on what one player did,...

The finance industry has grown. Financial markets have become more liquid. But have prices become more informative? We use stock and bond prices to forecast earnings and find that the information content of market prices has not increased since 1960. The magnitude of earnings surprises has...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason for why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of a transfer from the sovereign risk to corporate...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason for why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of a transfer from the sovereign risk to corporate...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, and information technology allows arbitrageurs to trade faster than ever. But have market prices then become more informative? We use stock and bond prices to forecast earnings and find that the information content of...

We analyze two reasons for export prices to be different across markets--namely, quality differentiation and variable markups--and attempt to parse their relative importance and some of their underlying drivers. To overcome the substantial measurement issues in this task, we consider a...

Reduced-form models of default that attribute a large fraction of credit spreads to compensation for credit event risk typically preclude the most plausible economic justification for such risk to be priced--namely, a “contagious” response of the market portfolio during the credit event....

The finance industry has grown. Financial markets have become more liquid. Information technology has improved. But have prices become more informative? Using stock and bond prices to forecast earnings, we find that the information content of market prices has not increased since 1960. The...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of sovereign risk transferring to corporates and...

Fundamental economic conditions are crucial determinants of equity premia. However, commonly used predictors do not adequately capture the changing nature of economic conditions and hence have limited power in forecasting equity returns. To address the inadequacy, this paper constructs macro...