The empirical finance literature makes extensive use of 'monthly' stock returns, where a monthly return is the change in stock price between one particular day of the calendar month - which we term the reference day - and the corresponding day of the following month. We show that estimates of...

We add to the concerns raised in Ljungqvist, Malloy and Marston, 2009, Rewriting History, Journal of Finance, 64, 1935-1960, about the reliability of the I/B/E/S data provided by Thomson Reuters (TR). Many of the dates reported as earnings announcement dates are not earnings announcement dates;...

In this paper we develop and estimate a new-Keynesian model of inflation and use it to investigate the hypothesis that prices in the UK are re-set more frequently during periods of high inflation. In the model, firms are assumed to condition their expectations on an optimally-selected but...

We show that the New-Keynesian (NK) model of inflation can be interpreted as a forward-looking cointegrated model. This allows us to model firms' expectations about marginal costs in a simple VAR framework and develop relatively simple formal tests of the model which bypass the econometric...

We use microeconomic data to explore the effects of a changing age-structure on the UK's aggregate personal savings rate. Our findings suggest that changes to the population's age structure age have had detectable, sustained, but, relative to the yearly changes observed in the savings rate over...

This paper provides an alternative to the theory of rational expectations (RE). Its central idea is that the information set on which agents will choose to condition their expectations will not, in general, include all the available information. Our alternative has many of the attractive...

This paper modifies the menu-cost model that Ball and Mankiw (1995) put forward to explain the correlation between the first- and higher-moments of the distribution of US price changes by allowing for non-zero trend inflation. Simulations suggest that even if trend inflation is only mildly...

The prevalence of prices ending in 99 cents is explained as the result of rational consumers rounding prices up. Monopolists are shown to be harmed by this practice whereas consumers may gain. The model is compared with two other models: Basu's (1997) model and one which assumes consumers round...

King (1997) develops a framework for assessing four monetary regimes: an optimal state-contingent rule; a non-contingent rule; pure discretion; and a Rogoffian conservative central banker. Using this framework we show (a) that King is wrong to claim that it implies that an optimally-conservative...