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...

This paper examines whether large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) by the Federal Reserve influenced capital flows out of the United States and into emerging market economies (EMEs) and also analyzes the degree of pass-through from long-term U.S. government bond yields to long-term EME bond yields....

This paper is concerned with testing the time series implications of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) due to Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965), when the number of securities, N, is large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. In the case of cross-sectionally correlated...

Asset market bubbles and crashes are a major source of economic instability and inefficiency. Sometimes ascribed to animal spirits or irrational exuberance, their source remains imperfectly understood. Experimental methods can isolate systematic deviations from an asset's fundamental value in a...

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...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...