The equity premium puzzle, first documented by Mehra and Prescott, refers to the empirical fact that stocks have greatly outperformed bonds over the last century. As Mehra and Prescott point out, it appears difficult to explain the magnitude of the equity premium within the usual economics...

In its attempt to model financial markets and the behavior of firms, modern finance theory starts from a set of normatively appealing axioms about individual behavior. Specifically, people are said to be risk-averse expected utility maximizers and unbiased Bayesian forecasters, i.e., agents make...

Behavioral Economics is the combination of psychology and economics that investigates what happens in markets in which some of the agents display human limitations and complications. We begin with a preliminary question about relevance. Does some combination of market forces, learning and...

Recent equity carve-outs in US technology stocks appear to violate a basic premise of financial theory: identical assets have identical prices. In our 1998-2000 sample, holders of a share of company A are expected to receive x shares of company B, but the price of A is less than x times the...

Initiations and omissions of dividend payments are important changes in corporate financial policy. This paper investigates the market reaction to such changes in terms of prices, volume, and changes in clientele. Consistent with the prior literature we find that short run price reactions to...