The limits-to-arbitrage framework explains how a speculative bubble can be sustained. But, it does not explain how often you should expect one to occur. To do that, you need to model the on/off switch which sporadically amplifies speculator biases, causing arbitrageur constraints to bind and a...

<p>This document contains presentation slides for the American Finance Association's Presidential Address of January 4, 2020. The address is based on the paper "Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance."</p><p>The paper: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3550880" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3550880...</p>

<p>I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance: the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is...</p>

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the relationship between asset returns and age-structure by investigating the case of Italy, which is experiencing one of the most pronounced ageing in the world. To this end, time-series regressions are run, in which real returns on different...

We study the economic importance of time-varying bond risk premia in a life-cycle consumption and portfolio-choice problem for an investor facing short-sales and borrowing constraints. On average, the investor is able to time bond markets only as of age~45. Tilts in the optimal asset allocation...

We consider the optimal investment and consumption policy for a constant absolute risk averse investor who faces fixed and/or proportional transaction costs when trading a stock and maximizes his expected utility from intertemporal consumption. We show that the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE with...

This paper reconstructs the series of the real returns on Italian equities, bank and Post Office deposits and long-term government bonds from 1860 to today. In the long-run the return on shares was much higher than that on government securities and also that on bank and Post Office deposits....

Adding a motivation for trading due to endowment differences to standard asset pricing assumptions, we investigate the impact of illiquidity due to small numbers of participants. We calibrate to observed activity levels, returns, transaction costs and volatility in equity markets. We show that,...

Adding a motivation for trading due to endowment differences to standard asset pricing assumptions, we investigate the impact of illiquidity due to small numbers of participants. We calibrate to observed activity levels, returns, transaction costs and volatility in equity markets. We show that,...

A negative real interest rate has guaranteed macroeconomic equilibrium during every emergency in the United States since the early 19th century, except the Great Depression in the 1930s when deflation interfered with the interest rate mechanism. During the Great Depression, the interest rate...