Speculators buy an asset hoping to sell it later to investors with higher private valuations. If agents are uncertain about the distribution of private valuations and about the beliefs of others about this distribution, a beauty contest with an infinite hierarchy of beliefs arises. Under...

Statistical model selection criteria provide an informed choice of the model with best external (i.e., out-of-sample) validity. Therefore they guard against overfitting ('data snooping'). We implement several model selection criteria in order to verify recent evidence of predictability in excess...

An empirical version of the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985a) call option pricing model is derived, assuming execution price uncertainty in the options market. the pricing restrictions come in the form of moment conditions in the option pricing error. These can be estimated and tested using a...

We report on six large-scale nancial markets experiments that were designed to test two of the most basic propositions of modern asset pricing theory, namely, that the interaction between risk averse agents in a competitive market leads to equilibration, and that, in equilibrium, risk premia are...

In an efficient securities market, prices correctly re ect news about future payoffs. This paper argues that there are two aspects to correctness: (i) correct updating of beliefs from news, (ii) correct prior beliefs. Traditionally, empirical research has implicitly insisted on both. Lucas'...

Efficiency in the IPO (Initial Public Offering) aftermarket is tested without imposing any restrictions on the priors about potential default at the issue date. Merging Ritter's extended dataset (which covers the period 1975-84) with the CRSP tapes, IPOs are followed up to ten years after issue....

The cross-section of average annual returns on German common stock in the period of 1881-1913 exhibits several of the patterns that have been observed in more recent U.S. data. Market beta is hardly important, and its explanatory power is swamped by size and the ratio of book value to market...

This paper tests whether the high average returns on the S&P 500 index in recent history can be attributed to mistaken expectations (the ex-ante risk premium -- taken to be constant -- is systematically less than the ex-post measured risk premium), or, alternatively, whether can they be...