For the past 20 years, financial markets research has concerned itself with issues related to the evaluation and management of financial securities in efficient capital markets and with issues of management control in incomplete markets. The following selective overview focuses on key aspects of...

We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumer responded to the 2001 Federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that, on...

Credit Unions are cooperative financial institutions specializing in the basic financial needs of certain groups of consumers. A distinguishing feature of credit unions is the legal requirement that members share a common bond. This organizing principle recently became the focus of national...

We examine trust and trustworthiness of individuals with varying professional preferences and experiences. Our subjects study business and economics in Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany and continental Europe. In the trust game, subjects with a high interest in working in the financial...

We explore the pattern of elderly homeownership using microeconomic surveys of 15 OECD countries, merging 60 national household surveys on about 300,000 individuals. In all countries the survey is repeated over time, permitting construction of an international dataset of repeated cross-sectional...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. We show that in order to minimize the risk and the cost of arbitrage an investor who identifies several mispriced assets optimally advertises only one of...

Within a two step GARCH framework we estimate the time-varying spillover effects from European and US return innovations to 10 economic sectors within the euro area, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We use daily data from January 1988 - March 2002. At the beginning of our sample...

It is theoretically clear and may be verified empirically that efficient financial markets can make it less necessary for policy to try and offset the welfare effects of labour income risk and unequal consumption dynamics. The literature has also pointed out that, since international competition...

A large literature over several decades reveals both extensive concern with the question of time-varying betas and an emerging consensus that betas are in fact time-varying, leading to the prominence of the conditional CAPM. Set against that background, we assess the dynamics in realized betas,...

We present an intertemporal consumption model of consumer investment in financial literacy. Consumers benefit from such investment because their stock of financial literacy allows them to increase the returns on their wealth. Since literacy depreciates over time and has a cost in terms of...