We present a simple overlapping generations model of an asset market in which irrational noise traders with erroneous stochastic beliefs both affect prices and earn higher expected returns. The unpredictability of noise traders' beliefs creates a risk in the price of the asset that deters...

The authors present a model of portfolio allocation by noise traders with incorrect expectations about return variances. For such misperceptions, noise traders who do not affect prices can earn higher expected returns than rational investors with similar risk aversion. Moreover, such noise...

This note shows that contrary to widespread belief there is little evidence that the business cycle is asymmetric. Using American data for the pre- and post-war periods and data on five other major OECD nations for the post-war period, we are unable to support the hypothesis that contractions...

Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over l9&)?l95 each percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of 1/3 a percentage point per...

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...

This paper uses Taylor's model of overlapping contracts to show that increased wage and price flexibility can easily be destabilizing. This result arises because of the Mundell effect. While lower prices increase output, the expectation of falling prices decreases output. Simulations based on...

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...

In this paper, we assess the degree to which four of the most commonly used models of risky decision making can explain the choices individuals make when faced with risky prospects. To make this assessment, we use experimental evidence for two random samples of young adults. Using a robust,...

We use the revised estimates of U.S. GNP constructed by Christina Romer (1989) to assess the time-series properties of U.S. output per capita over the past century. We reject at conventional significance levels the null that output is a random walk in favor of the alternative that output is a...