We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While...

We study the relation between cognitive ability and the decision to invest in stocks using the recent Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The survey has detailed data on wealth and portfolio composition of individuals aged 50+ in 11 European countries and three indicators...

Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are that they are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changes are predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whether these two features of the data may in fact be...

Financial market imperfections can prevent entrepreneurs from diversifying away the idiosyncratic risk of their business. As a result idiosyncratic risk discourages entrepreneurial activity and hinders growth, with the effects being stronger in economies with lower risk diversification...

The volatility of US business cycle has declined during the last two decades. During the same period the financial structure of firms has become more volatile. In this paper we develop a model in which financial factors play a key role in generating economic fluctuations. Innovations in...

In this paper we entertain the hypothesis that observed variations in income shares are the result of changes in the balance of power between workers and capital owners in labour relations. We show that this view implies that income share variations represent a risk factor of first-order...

This paper provides a new look at the timing of mutual fund investors. We re-examine the relationship between investors' aggregate net flows into and out of the funds and the returns of the funds in subsequent periods. The negative relationship that we find (using monthly data of aggregate US...

We examine formally Keynes' idea that higher order beliefs can drive a wedge between an asset price and its fundamental value based on expected future payoffs. Higher order expectations add an additional term to a standard asset pricing equation. We call this the higher order wedge, which...

The paper investigates the impact of financial integration on asset return, risk diversification and breadth of financial markets. We analyse a three-country macroeconomic model in which i) the number of financial assets is endogenous; ii) assets are imperfect substitutes; iii) cross-border...

A fall in house prices due to a change in fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a representative...