We study the implications of conformism among analysts in a CARA Gaussian model of the market for a risky asset, where a trader's information is a message sent by an analyst.  Conformism increases the weight of the public information in the messages, decreasing their informativeness.  More...

Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

The trend towards Internet self-regulation is driven both by governments that feel reluctant to invest in direct regulation (because of freedom of speech concerns or high costs of monitoring and enforcement) and by the industry that is under the threat of rising public concerns over content...

We propose that the formation of beliefs be treated as statistical hypothesis tests, and we label such beliefs inferential expectations. If a belief is overturned through the build-up of evidence, agents are assumed to switch to the rational expectation. Thus, rational expectations is a special...

In countries with credible inflation targeting, it seems plausible to suggest that instead of forming a rational expectation, some firms (inflation-targeters) might simply expect future inflation to always equal its target. This paper analyses the implications of this for optimal monetary policy...

Models of macroeconomic learning are populated by agents who possess a great deal of knowledge of the "true" structure of the economy, and yet ignore the impact of their own learning on that structure; they may learn about an equilibrium, but they do not learn within it.  An alternative learning...

Economic models of reputation make strong assumptions about the information available to players.  In particular, it is assumed that they know the entire history of the game to date.  Such models can seldom reproduce the cycling of reputations we observe in the real world.  We build a model...

In an economy with a fixed exchange rate regime that suffers a random adverse shock, we study the strategies of imperfectly and sequentially informed speculators that may trigger an endogenous devaluation before it occurs exogenously. The game played by the speculators has a unique symmetric...

This paper links real investment policy to corporate risk management, endogenizing the costs of external financing. Previous literature finds investment efficiency linked to full hedging. In this model, a firm with proprietary information when deciding its investment in a valuable project, may...

We provide evidence that firms attempting IPOs condition offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering on the experience of their primary market contemporaries. Moreover, while initial returns and IPO volume are positively correlated in the aggregate, the correlation is...