This paper studies how people make inference about a state of the world when the information structure includes additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning about effort from observed performance may require accounting for the otherwise irrelevant role of luck. This creates an...

We show that poor mutual fund performance can result from agency problems that drive fund inceptions. Funds created to exploit investor irrationality have different portfolio compositions at inception, loading heavily on past winner stocks. Investors reward these funds with abnormally high...

We propose a quantile--based method to estimate the parameters (i.e. locations, dispersions, co--dispersions and the tail index) of an elliptical distribution, and a battery of tests for model adequacy. The method is suitable for vast dimensions since the estimators for the location vector and...

We examine Markov-switching autoregressive models where the commonly used Gaussian assumption for disturbances is replaced with a skew-normal distribution. This allows us to detect regime changes not only in the mean and the variance of a specified time series, but also in its skewness. A...