In addition to a myriad of industrial uses, precious metals continue to play an important role in the global financial system; they are increasingly popular as an investment and form part of a well-diversified portfolio in addition to acting as central bank reserves. Understanding how...

Rapidly growing numbers of empirical papers assessing the financial effects of COVID-19 pandemic triggered an urgent need for a study summarising the existing knowledge of contagion phenomenon. This paper provides a review of conceptual approaches to studying financial contagion at four levels...

In laboratory experiments we explore the effects of communication and group decision making on investment behavior and on subjects' proneness to behavioral biases. Most importantly, we show that communication and group decision making does not impact subjects' overall proneness to biases like...

We investigate the impact of trader and cash inflow on bubble formation in asset markets with a novel design featuring heterogeneous information and a constant fundamental value. Implementing seven treatments we find that (i) only the joint inflow of traders and cash triggers bubbles...

To explore why bubbles frequently emerge in the experimental asset market model of Smith, Suchanek and Williams (1988), we vary the fundamental value process (constant or declining) and the cash-to-asset value-ratio (constant or increasing). We observe high mispricing in treatments with a...

The efficiency of financial markets, but also their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates. Yet, little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency. We run 116 experimental markets with 412 professionals and 502...

We study the use of trading strategies and their profitability in experimental asset markets with asymmetrically informed traders. We find that insiders make most of their profits from trades which are initiated by their limit orders -- especially at the beginning of a period and when the change...

The efficiency of financial markets and their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency. To close this gap, we run 86 experimental markets with 294...

The efficiency of financial markets and their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency. To close this gap, we run 86 experimental markets with 294...