This paper examines the power of statistical tests commonly used to examine the efficiency of speculative markets. It shows that for markets with "long horizons" such as the stock markets, or the market for long term bonds, these tests have very low power. Market valuations can differ...

I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macro- economics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, I develop a stylized macroeconomic model that embeds several mechanisms. With short-selling constraints, speculation can generate over- valuation and...

Noise traders are agents whose theoretical existence has been hypothesized as a way of solving certain fundamental problems in Financial Economics. We briefly review the literature on noise traders. The is an entry for The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition (Palgrave Macmillan:...

We use the revised estimates of U.S. GNP constructed by Christina Romer (1989) to assess the time-series properties of U.S. output per capita over the past century. We reject at conventional significance levels the null that output is a random walk in favor of the alternative that output is a...

Current and planned measures liberalizing the external capital accounts of France and Italy call into question the continued viability of the policy of periodic exchange-rate realignment followed to date in the European Monetary System (EMS). This paper is intended as a first step in studying...

We develop a model of monetary exchange in over-the-counter markets to study the effects of monetary policy on asset prices and standard measures of financial liquidity, such as bid-ask spreads, trade volume, and the incentives of dealers to supply immediacy, both by participating in the...

In a model with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria we add trade in assets that pay based on the realization of a sunspot. Asset trading restricts the equilibrium set in a way that raises welfare by eliminating equilibria with a high likelihood of disasters. When the probability of a disaster is...

A security's expected return can be decomposed into its "carry" and its expected price appreciation, where carry can be measured in advance without an asset pricing model. We find that carry predicts returns both in the cross section and time series for a variety of different asset classes that...