This paper proposes that the extent to which mutual fund managers' beliefs deviate from the ex ante unobservable representative beliefs of their peers contains information about their skill. A new measure based on portfolio allocations, quot;peer deviationquot;, is used to capture a fund...

Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...

We use mutual fund recommendations to test whether editorial content is independent from advertisers’ influence in the financial media. We find that major personal finance magazines (Money, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, and SmartMoney) are more likely to recommend funds from families that...

This paper proposes that the extent to which mutual fund managers’ beliefs deviate from the ex ante unobservable representative beliefs of their peers contains information about their skill. A new measure based on portfolio allocations, peer deviation, is used to capture a fund manager’s...

We survey the recent literature on learning in financial markets. Our main theme is that many financial market phenomena that appear puzzling at first sight are easier to understand once we recognize that parameters in financial models are uncertain and subject to learning. We discuss phenomena...

This paper presents a model to study the transmission of liquidity shocks across financial institutions through the creditor channel. In the model, a borrower institution obtains funds from a large institutional lender and small investors. When the large lender's asset market is hit by a...

In this paper we address the question as to why fund managers may trade on short-term information in a financial market that offers more profitable trading on long-term information. We consider a setting in which a fund manager's ability is unknown and an investor uses performance observations...

Several scholars of financial economics observed that during the 1980s, market interest rates declined continuously with little or no impact on credit card rates. Recently, Meyercord (1994), Sinkey and Nash (1993) and Sullivan and Worden (1995) recorded significant changes in the credit card...

The lack of access to financial services and to credit in particular is an issue in many developing countries. This paper studies the channels through which new borrowers get access to consumer loans and the effect of repayment data distribution both on that access and on subsequent bank...

This paper proposes a framework for assessing the performance of non-banking financial institutions (NFIs). Firstly, we present an overview of the non-banking financial institutions’ sector in Romania and, then, the CAAMPL system which is used to evaluate the performance of banks. We argue...