We study herd behavior in a laboratory financial market with financial market professionals. We compare two treatments, one in which the price adjusts to the order flow so that herding should never occur, and one in which event uncertainty makes herding possible. In the first treatment, subjects...

Following record low interest rates and fast depreciating U.S. dollar, crude oil prices became under rising pressure and seemed boundless. Oil price process parameters changed drastically in 2003M5-2007M10 toward consistently rising prices. Short-term forecasting would imply persistence of...

We use daily data on bank reserves and overnight interest rates to document a striking pattern in the high-frequency behavior of the U.S. market for federal funds: depository institutions tend to hold more reserves during the last few days of each “reserve maintenance period,” when the...

A stochastic volatility model where volatility was driven solely by a latent variable called news was estimated for three stock indices. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was used for estimating Bayesian parameters and filtering volatilities. Volatility persistence being close to one was...

Why do prices in Spain's regions fail to converge? The prime suspects for this puzzling result are differences in regional barriers to entry in retail distribution. This paper develops a Cournot-Nash model of imperfect competition to illustrate the effect of barriers on prices. A unique data...

The empirical analysis in "International R&D Spillovers" (Coe and Helpman, 1995) is first revisited by applying modern panel cointegration estimation techniques to an expanded data set that we have constructed for the purpose of this study. The new estimates confirm the key results reported in...

We propose a model of the interbank money market with an explicit role for central bank intervention and periodic reserve requirements, and study the interaction of profit-maximizing banks with a central bank targeting interest rates at high frequency. The model yields predictions on biweekly...

This paper applies the models used to study yield curve dynamics and spillovers in the U.S. and other countries to Central and Eastern European countries (CEE countries). Using the Diebold, Rudebusch, and Aruoba (2006) dynamic version of the Nelson-Siegel representation of the yield curve, the...

We study a banking model in which banks invest in a riskless asset and compete in both deposit and risky loan markets. The model predicts that as competition increases, both loans and assets increase; however, the effect on the loans-to-assets ratio is ambiguous. Similarly, as competition...

This paper studies two new models in which banks face a non-trivial asset allocation decision. The first model (CVH) predicts a negative relationship between banks' risk of failure and concentration, indicating a trade-off between competition and stability. The second model (BDN) predicts a...