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...

This paper studies asymptotically the bias of the fixed effect (FE) estimator induced by cross-section heterogeneity in the slope parameters of stationary vector autoregressions (VARs). The paper also compares the FE, the mean group estimator (MG), and a simple instrumental variable alternative...

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...

This paper reviews recent advances in the specification and estimation of Bayesian Vector Autoregressive models (BVARs). After describing the Bayesian principle of estimation, we first present the methodology originally developed by Litterman (1986) and Doan et al. (1984) and review alternative...

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...

We compare the performance of a currency board, inflation targeting, and dollarization in a small, open developing economy with a liberalized capital account. We focus on the transmission of shocks to currency and country risk premia and on the role of fluctuations in premia in the propagation...

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...

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...

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...