Mainstream finance textbooks present valuation formulas of annuities, perpetuities, stocks, and bonds, but the texts seldom explain the story behind them, leaving students in the dark about why these formulas work. The aim of this paper is to illuminate the black box of these formulas, thus...

In this paper we present an application where advanced undergraduate students can solve the expected utility portfolio model with a risk-free and a risky asset with both up and down returns in the Stock Market. With real Stock Market data, we use Excel Solver to find the portfolio decision and...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...

This paper discusses the link between financial development and macroeconomic volatility by exploring some of the ways through which financial development may affect business cycle fluctuations. To be specific, we examine whether stock market development exerts an unambiguous effect on...

A Ricardian-type set-up is used to explore the linkage between financial development and the business cycle. Though financial advancement may be good for growth due to making possible a higher degree of division of labor, it may, for the same reason, be bad for the business cycle. Building on...

In an overlapping generations economy, lenders fund risky investment projects of firms by drawing up loan contracts in the presence of an informational asymmetry. An optimal contract entails the issue of only debt, only equity, or a mix of the two. The equilibrium choice of contract depends on...

We examine 120 Nasdaq and Over-the-Counter buy recommendations made by Internet sites from April 1999 to June 2001. The stock picks show substantial short- and long-run price and liquidity gains, although no new information is revealed about them. For example, liquidity one year after the pick...

Conventional time series analysis, focusing exclusively on a time series at a given scale, lacks the ability to explain the nature of the data generating process. A process equation that successfully explains daily price changes, for example, is unable to characterize the nature of hourly price...

In den späten achtziger Jahren kam eine neue Prognosetechnik zur Anwendung: die Veranstaltung so genannter "experimenteller Aktienmärkte". Diese Technik wurde zunächst vorrangig im Bereich der Wahlprognose eingesetzt, später fand sie auch in anderen Bereichen Anwendung, so z.B. bei der...

In den späten achtziger Jahren kam eine neue Prognosetechnik zur Anwendung: die Veranstaltung so genannter "experimenteller Aktienmärkte". Diese Technik wurde zunächst vorrangig im Bereich der Wahlprognose eingesetzt, später fand sie auch in anderen Bereichen Anwendung, so z.B. bei der...