The heavy-tailed distribution of firm sizes first discovered by Zipf (1949) is one of the best established empirical facts in economics. We show that it has strong implications for asset pricing. Due to the concentration of the market portfolio when the distribution of the capitalization of...

The heavy-tailed distribution of firm sizes first discovered by Zipf (1949) is one of the best established empirical facts in economics. We show that it has strong implications for asset pricing. Due to the concentration of the market portfolio when the distribution of the capitalization of...

The heavy-tailed distribution of firm sizes first discovered by Zipf (1949) is one of the best established empirical facts in economics. We show that it has strong implications for asset pricing. Due to the concentration of the market portfolio when the distribution of the capitalization of...

Abreu and Brunnermeier (2003) have argued that bubbles are not suppressed by arbitrageurs because they fail to synchronise on the uncertain beginning of the bubble. We propose an indirect quantitative test of this hypothesis and confront it with the alternative according to which bubbles persist...

We analyse the consequences of predicting and exploiting financial bubbles in an agent-based model, with a risky and a risk-free asset and three different trader types: fundamentalists, noise traders and "dragon riders" (DR). The DR exploit their ability to diagnose financial bubbles from the...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set -up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

A vast literature investigating behavioural underpinnings of financial bubbles and crashes relies on laboratory experiments. However, it is not yet clear how findings generated in a highly artificial environment relate to the human behaviour in the wild. It is of concern that the laboratory...

Building on the notion that bubbles are transient self-fulfilling prophecies created by positive feedback mechanisms, we construct the simplest continuous price process whose expected returns and volatility are functions of momentum only. The momentum itself is measured by a simple continuous...