This paper presents 12 facts about the mortgage market. The authors argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from financial industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. Instead, they argue that borrowers and investors made decisions that...

We present 12 facts about the mortgage crisis. We argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from finance industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. Instead, we argue that borrowers and investors made decisions that were rational and...

Bubbles are omnipresent in lab experiments with asset markets. Most of these experiments were conducted in environments with only human traders. Today markets are substantially determined by algorithmic traders. Here we use a laboratory experiment to measure changes of human trading behavior if...

We study return predictability using a model of speculative trading among relatively overconfident competitive traders who agree to disagree about the precision of their private information. Although traders apply Bayes Law consistently, returns are predictable. In addition to trading on...

We model a financial market where some traders of a risky asset do not fully appreciate what prices convey about others' private information. Markets comprising solely such "cursed" traders generate more trade than those comprising solely rationals. Because rationals arbitrage distortions caused...

Using survey forecasts, we find that systematic errors in expectations of long-term inflation and short-term nominal earnings growth are the main driver of prices and return puzzles for bonds and stocks. We demonstrate this by deriving and testing a single necessary and sufficient condition...

We provide empirical evidence that the optimism bias increases with the forecasting horizon. We label this empirical regularity the horizon bias. In the US and abroad, professional forecasters demonstrate significant horizon bias in their macroeconomic expectations. Our results show a horizon...

We present 12 facts about the mortgage crisis. We argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from finance industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. Instead, we argue that borrowers and investors made decisions that were rational and...

We apply the sequential unit root tests of Phillips et al. (2015) for mildly explosive processes to identify and date-stamp bubbles in the emerging and frontier African stock markets. We find periods of explosive behavior in the price–dividend ratio in several markets which is indicative of...