A growing body of literature reports evidence of social interaction effects in survey expectations. In this note, we argue that evidence in favor of social interaction effects should be treated with caution, or could even be spurious. Utilizing a parsimonious stochastic model of expectation...

We perform a careful spectral analysis of the correlation structures observed in real and financial returns for a large pool of long-lived US corporations, and find that financial returns are characterized by strong collective fluctuations that are absent from real returns. Once the excessive...

We express the idea of classical competition in a statistical equilibrium model, where the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates results in an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. The model supports and extends recent evidence on the Laplace distribution of growth rates in...