This paper evaluates how well sectoral stock prices forecast future economic activity compared to traditional predictors such as the term spread, dividend yield, exchange rates and money growth. The study is applied to euro area financial asset prices and real economic growth, covering the...

We first report that one-minute returns on TOPIX have exhibited significant autocorrelation at five-minute intervals since 1997/98, which implies there is an arbitrage opportunity. Special quotes that are issued whenever there is a price jump in excess of a predetermined band seem to be the...

The paper examines the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams with a social welfare function which respects the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms. It provides a complete characterization of domains (of the one period utilities) on which such an aggregation is possible. A social welfare...

It is known that the incompleteness of asset markets causes inefficiency in almost every equilibrium. Yet unexplored is the ”size” of this inefficiency. The size of a Pareto improvement is the total willingness to pay for it, out of current consumption. Inefficiency is the maximum size of...

Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard...

While most papers on team decision-making find that teams behave more selfishly, less trustingly and less altruistically than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group...

This paper studies the construction of social preferences in the lab. Experimental subjects have the opportunity to donate to a charity and to allocate money in a conventional dictator game. The results show that charitable donations and dictator game allocations are positively correlated. The...

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view....

We provide a test of the role of social preferences and beliefs in voluntary cooperation and its decline. We elicit individuals' cooperation preferences in one experiment and use them as well as subjects' elicited beliefs to explain contributions to a public good played repeatedly. We find...

We study ultimatum and dictator experiments where the first mover chooses the amount of money to be distributed between the players within a given interval, knowing that her own share is fixed. Thus, the first mover is faced with scarcity, but not with the typical trade-off between her own and...