Recent equity carve-outs in US technology stocks appear to violate a basic premise of financial theory: identical assets have identical prices. In our 1998-2000 sample, holders of a share of company A are expected to receive x shares of company B, but the price of A is less than x times the...

Behavioral Economics is the combination of psychology and economics that investigates what happens in markets in which some of the agents display human limitations and complications. We begin with a preliminary question about relevance. Does some combination of market forces, learning and...

Initiations and omissions of dividend payments are important changes in corporate financial policy. This paper investigates the market reaction to such changes in terms of prices, volume, and changes in clientele. Consistent with the prior literature we find that short run price reactions to...

In its attempt to model financial markets and the behavior of firms, modern finance theory starts from a set of normatively appealing axioms about individual behavior. Specifically, people are said to be risk-averse expected utility maximizers and unbiased Bayesian forecasters, i.e., agents make...

The equity premium puzzle, first documented by Mehra and Prescott, refers to the empirical fact that stocks have greatly outperformed bonds over the last century. As Mehra and Prescott point out, it appears difficult to explain the magnitude of the equity premium within the usual economics...

Nominal prices of common stocks have remained constant at around $30 per share since the Great Depression as a result of firms splitting their stocks. It is surprising that firms actively maintained constant nominal price for their shares while general prices in the economy went up more than ten...

We argue that quot;narrow framing,quot; whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, separately from other risks she already faces, may be a more important feature of decision-making than previously realized. Our starting point is the evidence that people are...

We examine the risky choices of contestants in the popular TV game show quot;Deal or No Dealquot; and related classroom experiments. Contrary to the traditional view of expected utility theory, the choices can be explained in large part by previous outcomes experienced during the game. Risk...

We examine cooperative behavior when large sums of money are at stake, using data from the TV game show “Golden Balls.” At the end of each episode, contestants play a variant on the classic Prisoner's Dilemma for large and widely ranging stakes averaging over $20,000. Cooperation is...