Newspapers and weekly magazines catering to the investing crowd often rank funds according to the returns generated in the past. Aside from satisfying sheer curiosity, these numbers are probably also the basis on which investors pick a fund to invest in. In this article, we fully characterize...

We provide a framework for the analysis of term structures of credit spreads on corporate bonds in the presence of informational asymmetries. While bond investors observe default incidents, we suppose that they have incomplete information on the firm's assets and/or the threshold asset level at...

This paper tests the validity of Present Value (PV) models of stock prices by employing a two-step strategy for testing the null hypothesis of no cointegration against alternatives which are fractionally cointegrated. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to evaluate the power and size...

People dislike inflation because inflation erodes the real value of future nominal income and wealth. Adjustment of future nominal values via a cost of living index is an appropriate way to handle the problem of real income risk. Nonetheless an important aspect needs more discussion: If markets...

We consider a financial market model with a large number of interacting agents. Investors are heterogeneous in their expectations about the future evolution of an asset price process. Their current expectation is based on the previous states of their "neighbors" and on a random signal about the...

In this paper individual overconfidence within the context of an experimental asset market is investigated. Overall, 72 participants traded one risky asset on six markets of 12 participants each. The results indicate that individuals were not generally overconfident. Moreover, overconfidence was...