Bubbles are omnipresent in lab experiments with asset markets. Most of these experiments were conducted in environments with only human traders. Today markets are substantially determined by algorithmic traders. Here we use a laboratory experiment to measure changes of human trading behavior if...

Higher order beliefs - beliefs about others' beliefs - may be important for trading behaviour and asset prices, but have received little systematic empirical examination. We study more than twenty years of evidence from the Robert Shiller Investor Confidence surveys, which directly elicit...

This paper explains both the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery afterwards in Russia and other Former Soviet Union (FSU) economies. Before the crisis banks do not lend to the real sector of the economy and firms use non-bank finance, including trade credits...

The paper argues that persistent current account surpluses and increasing foreign currency-denominated asset positions constitute long-term appreciation expectations on yuan and yen, which have made China and Japan vulnerable to U.S. interest rate cuts and appreciation expectation shocks. For...

We address the question of whether growth and welfare can be higher in crisis prone economies. First, we show that there is a robust empirical link between per-capita GDP growth and negative skewness of credit growth across countries with active financial markets. That is, countries that have...

In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...

We propose a simple model of borrower optimism in competitive lending markets with asymmetric information. Borrowers in our model engage in self-deception to arrive at a belief that optimally trades off the anticipatory utility benefits and material costs of optimism. Lenders' contract design...

This paper explores the behavior of emerging market mutual funds using anovel database covering the holdings of individual funds over the periodJanuary 1996 to March 1999. An examination of individual crises shows that,on average, funds withdrew money one month prior to the events. Thedegree of...

The paper analyzes a very stylized model of crises and demonstrates how the degree of strategic complementarity in the actions of investors is a critical determinant of fragility. It is shown how the balance sheet composition of a financial intermediary, parameters of the information structure...

We analyze how investor expectations about economic growth and stock returns changed during the February-March 2020 stock market crash induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during the subsequent partial stock market recovery. We surveyed retail investors who are clients of Vanguard at...