Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as quot;information marketsquot;, quot;idea futuresquot; or quot;event futuresquot;, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts....

Firms and individuals who sell opinions may bias their reports for either behavioral or strategic reasons. This paper proposes a methodology for measuring these biases, particularly whether opinion producers under or over emphasize their private information, i.e. whether they herd or exaggerate...

In models by Fershtman and Judd (1987) and Sklivas (1987), firms competing in quantities benefit strategically from commiting to managerial incentives that are biased toward revenue maximization. Little empirical evidence has been produced in support of these models, and their assumption that...

International mutual funds that make ad hoc fair value adjustments are less likely to do so on Fridays, despite the fect that there is actually more need to fair value on Friday and that fair valuation would prevent arbitrage that currently costs long-term shareholders about 1 percent of assets...

This paper reviews the size and scope of the mutual fund arbitrage problem, the inadequacy of the most popular solutions adopted by the industry to date, and the surprisingly slow response of many funds to the issue. As is becoming increasingly widely known, mutual funds often calculate their...

This paper reports evidence that Regulation Fair Disclosure has had its desired effect of reducing selective disclosure of information about future earnings to individual analysts without reducing the total amount of information disclosed. In particular, it finds that multi-forecast days, which...

Firms and individuals who sell opinions may bias their reportsfor either behavioral or strategic reasons. This paper proposesa methodology for measuring these biases, particularly whetheropinion producers under or over emphasize their privateinformation, i.e. whether they herd or exaggerate...

This paper models the incentives created by career concerns for opinion-producing agents. We find that career concerns can create an incentive for exaggeration or anti-herding, since high-ability agents will have opinions that are more different from the consensus on average and potential...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as quot;information markets,quot; quot;idea futuresquot; or quot;event futuresquot;, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts....