This paper investigates the accuracy and heterogeneity of output growth and inflation forecasts during the current and the four preceding NBER-dated U.S. recessions. We generate forecasts from six different models of the U.S. economy and compare them to professional forecasts from the Federal...

I examine a class of utility maximization problems with a not necessarily lawinvariant utility, and with a not necessarily law-invariant risk measure constraint. The objective function is an integral of some function U with respect to some probability measure P, and the constraint set contains...

We consider an exchange economy with heterogeneous agents and multiple assets and investigate the coupled dynamics of assets' prices and agents' wealth. We assume that agents have heterogeneous beliefs and invest on each asset a fraction of wealth proportional to its expected dividends. Our main...

In a dynamic stochastic exchange economy where, due to beliefs heterogeneity, agents engage in speculative trade, I investigate the Market Selection Hypothesis that speculation rewards the agent with the most accurate beliefs. Assuming that agents maximize Epstein-Zin preferences and that...

This paper investigates whether short-term momentum and long-term reversal may emerge from the wealth reallocation process taking place in speculative markets. We assume that there are two classes of investors who trade long-lived assets by holding constantly rebalanced portfolios based on their...

We use administrative and survey-based micro data to study the relationship between cognitive abilities (IQ), the formation of economic expectations, and the choices of a representative male population. Men above the median IQ (high-IQ men) display 50% lower forecast errors for inflation than...

Abstract This paper fills an important gap in the literature on determinacy and existence of sunspot equilibria in stochastic linear self-referential models. The results in this paper demonstrate that heterogeneity in expectations may alter a model's regions of determinacy. We show how to...

This papers studies the impact of a financial transactions tax on the trading volume and asset price volatility in a model with heterogeneous beliefs. To model heterogeneous beliefs we follow Kurz (1994, 1997) and restrict the class of beliefs to the subset of rational beliefs. We study a tax...

In this paper we study the effects of financial integration on risk-sharing. Conventional macroeconomic theory suggests that the integration of financial markets improves welfare. In contrast to the literature we assume that households have heterogeneous beliefs. Because of the differences in...

Speculation, in the spirit of Harrison and Kreps [1978], is introduced into a standard real business cycle model. Investors (speculators) hold heterogeneous beliefs about firm growth. Firm ownership, and thus, the firm's discount factor varies with waves of optimism and leverage. These waves...