During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

Agency-based explanations of the great deprivation, contrasted with structure-based explanations, suffer not merely from the criticism of relying on irrational and irresponsible behavior of millions, including that of the most astute financial experts, but are also at a loss to explain why such...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

We show in this paper how, in a model of assets exchange in complete competitive markets, heterogeneity of the agent's subjective probabilities generates aggregate expenditures for Arrow-Debreu securities that have the gross substitutability property, with the consequences that competitive...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

It is generally accepted that excessive exuberance or gloom in investor sentiment contributes to booms and crashes in share prices. However, views differ on the merits of active policy intervention due to gaps in our understanding of the transmission mechanism. To fill this gap we apply a fully...

The paper demonstrates possibilities of both convergence to the steady state and emergence of stable growth cycles around it in a simple macrodynamic model of debt-financed investment-led growth. The growth cycles are robust and are generated endogenously, either due to the existence of a...

We construct asset markets, that are similar to those studied by Smith, Suchanek and Willians (1988), in which bubbles and crashes tended to occur. The main difference between the markets studied here and those studied by Smith et al. are that in the markets studied here, the fundamental values...

We report the results of an experiment designed to study the role of speculation in the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets. In a setting in which speculation is not possible, bubbles and crashes are observed. The results suggest that the departures from fundamental...

This paper presents a two-country, two-good, two-currency overlapping generatioons models that features limited participation and costly state verification inthe credit market.