Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants...

This paper investigates the predictive power of the shadow rate for the inflation rate in countries with a zero lower bound (the US, the UK and Canada) and in those with negative rates (Japan, the Euro Area and Switzerland). Using shadow rates obtained from two different models (the Wu-Xia...

Hurricanes are among the costliest natural disasters in the world, with a significant portion of their impact linked to the accuracy of their forecasts. In this paper, we estimate the economic impacts of the official hurricane forecasts in the US and develop a new approach for measuring the...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...

Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...

Banking reform has proved to be one of the most problematic elements of economic transition in central and Eastern Europe. Therefore the paper considers the development of the Estonian banking sector and derives individual banks ́fragility scores during transition. To this end we use...