Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explana-tory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent “microstruc-ture approach to exchange rates” has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows....

We study the loan contracing problem of Gale and Hellwig (1985) under general assumptions of risk aversion and possibly diverse subjective beliefs of the borrower and lender about the income of the investment. We characterize the optimal contract and show that (i) the contractual payoff in...

The no trade principle asserts that risk-neutral agents are not prepared to trade if and only if a common prior exists. The purpose of this article is to provide general versions of this principle. We first study the case when no topological assumption is made on the state space. Bets are...

This paper addresses the relationship between individual perceptions and the uses of a business language. Perceptions are modeled explicitly, and are not common knowledge. A business language enables individuals with different perceptions to trade. I present a formal criterion for faithfulness...

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets. More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As predicted by theory, we find that...

Credit sharing information mechanisms represent the institutional answer to the asymmetric information problems inherent to credit markets. It is generally accepted that sharing information is beneficial for the participant institutions, however, there are few studies that have measured the...

By using data from surveys of expectations, it is shown that macroeconomic uncertainty, measured by the standard deviation of the expected output growth, the expected unemployment rate, and the expected inflation rate, is negatively related to the expected performance of the economy, proxied by...

The paper recognizes that expectations and the process of their formation are subject to standard decision making and are determined as a part of equilibrium. Accordingly, the paper presents a basic framework in which the form of expectation formation is a choice variable. At any point in time...