We develop a model of political cycles driven by time-varying risk aversion. Agents choose to work in the public or private sector and to vote Democrat or Republican. In equilibrium, when risk aversion is high, agents elect Democrats---the party promising more redistribution. The model predicts...

This paper investigates the asset pricing implications of investor disagreement about the likelihood of a systematic disaster. I specify a general equilibrium model with multiple trees and heterogeneous beliefs about rare event risk, to understand how risk-sharing mechanisms affect equity and...

We propose a risk-based firm-type explanation on why stocks of firms with high relative short interest (RSI) have lower future returns. We argue that these firms have negative alphas because they are a hedge against expected aggregate volatility risk. Consistent with this argument, we show that...

This paper shows that in asset pricing the information environment gives rise to a systematic risk factor when the informativeness of future news events varies with their content (i.e., bad news and good news are not equally informative). The paper further shows that in such cases (cross) serial...

Motivated by research in psychology and experimental economics, we assume that investors update their beliefs about an asset's value upon observing the price, but only when the price clearly reveals that others obtained private information that differs from their own private information....

I develop a macroeconomic model of information production in financial markets during asset price booms and busts. Agents acquire information to decide which firms to fund. In the aggregate, more precise information leads to less capital misallocation. The source of booms and busts determines...

We propose a dynamic asset-market equilibrium model in which (1) an "innovative" asset with as-yet-unknown average payoff is traded, and (2) investors delegate investment to experts. Experts secretly renege on investors' orders and take on leveraged positions in the asset to manipulate...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set -up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

A vast literature investigating behavioural underpinnings of financial bubbles and crashes relies on laboratory experiments. However, it is not yet clear how findings generated in a highly artificial environment relate to the human behaviour in the wild. It is of concern that the laboratory...

We model a scenario in which there are three types of investors: fundamentalists, speculators, and trend-followers and an intermediary who cares about his reputation. Fundamentalists are rational investors with long horizons who are interested in the dividend stream. Speculators are rational...