This paper provides a microfounded information acquisition technology based on a simple framework with information search. When searchable information is limited, an agent encounters increasingly more redundant information in his search for new information. Redundancy slows down the learning...

The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and robust growth. Their index has several important features that distinguish it from the Conference...

Investors rely on the stock-bond correlation for a variety of tasks, such as forming optimal portfolios, designing hedging strategies, and assessing risk. Most investors estimate the stock-bond correlation simply by extrapolating the historical correlation of monthly returns and assume that this...

We study the existence and uniqueness of minimal supersolutions of backward stochastic differential equations with generators that are jointly lower semicontinuous, bounded below by an affine function of the control variable and satisfy a specific normalization property. -- Supersolutions of...

Investors sometimes have strong convictions that a distinctive economic regime will prevail in the period ahead and therefore would like to form a portfolio that reflects the expected returns, standard deviations, and correlations of assets during such a regime. To do so, they typically isolate...

The current study examines individual decision making in the field of personal finance. How do people arrive at a financial decision? A laboratory experiment investigates the way external information is integrated into the decision-making process. Financial literacy shows to lower demand for...

This experimental study measures three types of overconfidence in the decision behavior of participants from Germany and Japan. In the first stage of the experiment subjects completed a Raven Progressive Matrices test and subsequently assessed their test performance in absolute and relative...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have an asymmetric distribution of outcomes. In a series of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate the asymmetry or ignore it completely. Participants...

We study how lines form endogenously in front of banks when depositors differ in their liquidity needs. Our model has two stages. In the first one, depositors choose the level of costly effort they want to exert to arrive early at the bank which determines the order of decisions. In the second...

We investigate the relationship between anchoring and the emergence of bubbles in experimental asset markets. We show that setting a visual anchor at the fundamental value (FV) in the first period only is sufficient to eliminate or to significantly reduce bubbles in laboratory asset markets. If...