__Abstract__ The financial world does not have the best reputation. One of the problems is the perceived lack of integrity of financial markets, which is fuelled by examples of financial misconduct. I argue that with financial data becoming more widely available and constantly improving,...

We examine the consequences of transparency in an experimental multiple-dealer market with asymmetrically informed dealers. Five professional securities traders make a market for a single security. In each trading round, one of the dealers (the "insider") is told the security's true value. We...

Bubbles can persist because investors are better off riding bubbles. We define bubbles in a natural way as significant, prolonged deviations from fundamental values measured by the well-known asset pricing models. Our real-time bubble detection system shows that –using US industry returns–...

News plays a crucial role in determining prices in financial markets. In an efficient market, current prices fully and correctly reflect all available information, such that only truly new information leads to price adjustment. This lecture shows that using high-frequency data makes it possible...

We show that results in the recent strand of the literature that tries to explain stock returns by weather induced mood shifts of investors might be data-driven inference. More specifically, we consider two recent studies (Kamstra, Kramer and Levi, 2003a and Cao and Wei, 2004) that claim that a...

We study risk perception and actual decision-making by the corporate elite, where we consider CEOs, CFOs and non-executives. We collect data for many members of the elite for Netherlands-based companies using the vignettes method. We find that CEOs are more risk tolerant but do not act...

In this paper we explore the relevance of dividends in the total equity return over longer time horizons. In addition, we investigate the effects of different reinvestment assumptions of dividends. We use a unique set of revised and corrected US equity data series, comprising monthly prices and...

In this paper, we analyze the economic value of predicting stock index returns as well as volatility. On the basis of simple linear models, estimated recursively, we produce genuine out-of-sample forecasts for the return on the S&P 500 index and its volatility. Using monthly data from 1954 to...

This paper examines whether the stock market valuation impact is consistent with subsequent operating performance of firms. We use data for equity rights offerings - the widely adopted flotation method in the Netherlands. We first examine the stock market announcement effect of rights issues and...

Believers in the law of small numbers tend to overinfer the outcome of a random process after a small series of observations. They believe that small samples replicate the probability distribution properties of the population. We provide empirical evidence indicating that investors are...