Prediction markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. Using these markets as forecasting tools could substantially improve decision making in the private and public sectors. We argue that U.S....

Research in psychology and behavioral finance is surveyed for evidence to what extent experts such as professional investment managers or endowment trustees may behave in such a way as to help perpetuate speculative bubbles in financial markets. This paper discusses scholarly psychological...

This article makes the case for using index-based futures and options driven by region-specific movements in house prices as the basis for hedging mortgage default risk. Taking the view that mortgage holders write put options on real estate assets, the first part of the article lays out the...

Contagion or epidemic models of financial markets are proposed in which interest in or attention to individual stocks is spread by word of mouth. The models give alternative interpretations of the random walk character of stock prices. A questionnaire survey of institutional investors was...

The consumption beta theorem of Breeden makes the expected return on any asset a function only of its covariance with changes in aggregate consumption. It is shown that the theorem is more robust than was indicated by Breeden. The theorem obtains even if one deletes Breeden's assumptions that...

To address the moral hazard problem that can motivate bank executives to take excessive risks and to fail to raise capital when needed, a group of 13 distinguished financial economists recommends that systemically important financial institutions be required to issue contingent convertible debt...

The recent literature on rational expectations in macroeconomic theory is surveyed here with the objective of distilling from the various papers useful suggestions for econometric methodology. The paper is not concerned with the empirical questions with which these models have been associated,...

In some applications of the distributed lag model, theory requires that all lag coefficients have a positive sign. A distributed lag estimator which provides estimated coefficients with positive sign is developed here which is analogous to an earlier distributed lag estimator derived from...

Although little noticed, the face of central banking has changed significantly over the past ten to fifteen years, says the author of this enlightening book. Alan S. Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System and member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers,...

How much credit can be given to entrepreneurship for the unprecedented innovation and growth of free-enterprise economies? In this book, some of the world's leading economists tackle this difficult and understudied question, and their responses shed new light on how free-market economies...