This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

I study the consumption responses of heterogeneous households following changes in both house prices and interest rates. I show the common assumption that household period utility is separable in housing and consumption can be consistent with the observed co-movement between these two series...

During the last decades many financial analysts, either theorists or practitioners, have dedicated their studies to the interactions between different financial sectors. The results of these researches confirm that commodities, bonds and stock markets are closely related, therefore a thorough...

Misspecification of agents' information sets or expectation formation mechanisms maylead to noncausal autoregressive representations of asset prices. Annual US stock prices are found to be noncausal, implying that agents' expectations are not revealed to an outside observer such as an...

The way in which market participants form expectations affects the dynamic properties of financial asset prices and therefore the appropriateness of different econometric tools used for empirical asset pricing. In addition to standard rational expectations models, this thesis studies a class of...

The financial crisis has revealed fatal institutional and structural deficits at the finance market. Politics has reacted to the financial crisis with a sea of legal bills and regulations. But all regulating efforts are merely system-imminent reparation measures and do not solve the core...

Never has the issue of sovereign credit ratings attracted such an interest by policy and opinion makers, bankers and journalists, or even the public opinion, as witnessed in the last couple of years. In spite of being accused of contributing to the instability of financial markets, credit rating...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...

I present evidence that higher frequency measures of inflation expectations outperform lower frequency measures of inflation expectations in tests of accuracy, predictive power, and rationality. For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the...