Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

Allowing for a richer information structure than usual, we show that rational traders’ calculation with short-term price fluctuations may heavily influence their behaviour even if the interim price is not influenced by non-rational agents i.e. there is no noise trader risk. Instead, traders...

We introduce an alternative version of the Fama-French three-factor model of stock returns together with a new estimation methodology. We assume that the factor betas in the model are smooth nonlinear functions of observed security characteristics. We develop an estimation procedure that...

Speculative industries exploit novel technologies subject to two risks. First, there is uncertainty about the fundamental value of the innovation: is it strong or fragile? Second, it is difficult to monitor managers, which creates moral hazard. Because of moral hazard, managers earn agency rents...

We show, in an exchange economy with default, liquidity constraints and no aggregate uncertainty, that state prices in a complete markets general equilibrium are a function of the supply of liquidity by the Central Bank. Our model is derived along the lines of Dubey and Geanakoplos (1992). Two...

This paper surveys asset allocation methods that extend the traditional approach. An important feature of the traditional approach is that measures the risk and return tradeoff in terms of mean and variance of final wealth. However, there are also other important features that are not always...

This paper introduces a new class of parameter estimators for dynamic models, called Simulated Nonparametric Estimators (SNE). The SNE minimizes appropriate distances between nonparametric joint (or conditional) densities estimated from sample data and nonparametric joint (or conditional)...

After the seminal paper of Jarrow and Rudd (1982), several authors have proposed to use different statistical series expansion to price options when the risk-neutral density is asymmetric and leptokurtic. Amongst them, one can distinguish the Gram-Charlier Type A series expansion (Corrado and...

The paper draws lessons from the experience of the past year for the conduct of central banks in the pursuit of macroeconomic and financial stability. Macroeconomic stability is defined as either price stability or as price stability and sustainable output or employment growth. Financial...

This paper provides evidence that managers adjust firm advertising, in part, to attract investor attention and influence short-term stock returns. First, I show that increased advertising spending is associated with a contemporaneous rise in retail buying and abnormal stock returns, and is...