Previous research has documented strong peer effects in risk taking, but little is known about how such social influences affect market outcomes. The consequences of social interactions are hard to isolate in financial data, and theoretically it is not clear whether peer effects should increase...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

I study the effect of heterogeneous beliefs about asset prices on the long-term behavior of financial markets. Starting from the ideas of Abreu and Brunnermeier (2003), a two-dimensional system of differential equations is developed. The first dynamic variable is the asset price growth rate. The...

We study an economy with incomplete information in which two agents are uncertain and disagree about the length of business cycles. That is, the agents do not question whether the economy is growing or not, but instead continuously estimate how long economic cycles will last — i.e., they learn...

We assess the ability of an information aggregation mechanism that operates in the over-the-counter market for financial derivatives to reduce valuation uncertainty among market participants. The analysis is based on a unique dataset of price estimates for S&P 500 index options that major...

Revisions of consensus forecasts of macroeconomic variables positively predict announcement day forecast errors, whereas stock market returns on forecast revision days negatively predict announcement day returns. A dynamic noisy rational expectations model with periodic macroeconomic...

This paper reviews the literature examining how costs of monitoring for, acquiring, and analyzing firm disclosures – collectively, “disclosure processing costs” – affect investor information choices, trades, and market outcomes. The existence of disclosure processing costs means that...

We study the emergence of bubbles in a laboratory experiment with large groups of individuals. The realized price is the aggregation of the forecasts of a group of individuals, with positive expectations feedback through speculative demand. When prices deviate from fundamental value, a random...

This paper studies the joint determination of optimal contracts and equilibrium asset prices in an economy with multiple principal-agent pairs. Principals design optimal contracts that provide incentives for agents to acquire costly information. With agency problems, the agents' compensation...