We study asset prices in an economy where some investors classify risky assets into different styles and move funds back and forth between these styles depending on their relative performance. Our assumptions imply that news about one style can affect the prices of other apparently unrelated...

Analyses of the role of rational speculators in financial markets usually presume that such investors dampen price fluctuations by trading against liquidity or noise traders. This conclusion does not necessarily hold when noise traders follow positive-feedback investment strategies buy when...

The claim that financial markets are efficient is backed by an implicit argument that misinformed "noise traders" can have little influence on asset prices in equilibrium. If noise traders' beliefs are sufficiently different from those of rational agents to significantly affect prices, then...

We present a simple model of asset pricing in which payoff salience drives investors' demand for risky assets. The key implication is that extreme payoffs receive disproportionate weight in the market valuation of assets. The model accounts for several puzzles in finance in an intuitive way,...

In recent years, comparative economics experienced a revival, with a new focus on comparing capitalist economies. The theme of the new research is that institutions exert a profound influence on economic development. We argue that, to understand capitalist institutions, one needs to understand...