This paper examines experimentally two common conjectures in the popular literature on financial markets: that they are swayed by emotion and that they behave like a 'crowd'. We find consistent evidence that deviations of prices from fundamental value depend on the emotion of excitement and on...

The size of adverse selection and moral hazard effects in health insurance markets has important policy implications. For example, if adverse selection effects are small while moral hazard effects are large, conventional remedies for inefficiencies created by adverse selection (e.g., mandatory...

Access to elective surgery in Australian public hospitals is rationed using waiting lists. In this paper we undertake a DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux reweighting approach to attribute variation in waiting time to clinical need or to discrimination. Using data from NSW public patients in 2004-2005, we...

One of the core goals of a universal health care system is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of socioeconomic status. We test for discrimination using patient waiting times for non-emergency treatment in public hospitals. Waiting time should reflect patients clinical need with priority...

We construct a time-varying factor model of hedge fund returns that accounts for market risk, leverage, illiquidity and tail events. We also adjust for database biases arising from voluntary self-reporting. Using a constant beta model, we find no evidence of excess returns for the average hedge...

Past studies in the literature of the law of one price (LOP) show statistically significant but economically subtle roles of geographical distance in regional price dispersions. In this paper, we challenge this empirical "death of distance" as a primary source of LOP violations investigating a...

The economics profession, as a whole, has a gravely confused understanding of opportunity cost, a concept widely regarded as one of the most fundamental ideas of economics. The muddle arises because of the existence of two contrary conceptions of opportunity cost which are presumed to be the...

In exploring the learning experiences of students, some educationalists have advanced the 'threshold concept hypothesis' according to which certain concepts in various disciplines act as thresholds. Such concepts need to be mastered before further progress can be made in a discipline - they act...

Diversification has its obvious benefits but its pursuit can involve a trade-off between risk-controls and returns. We investigate this trade-off by examining the relative performance of diversified versus concentrated portfolios both formed on the basis of the same stock preferences. Using US...