Monetary historians conventionally trace the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to the turbulence of the Panic of 1907. But why did the successful movement for creating a U.S. central bank follow the Panic of 1907 and not any earlier National Banking Era panic? The 1907 panic...

The equity premium of interest in theoretical models is the extra return investors anticipate when purchasing risky stock instead of risk-free debt. Unfortunately, we do not observe this ex ante premium in the data; we only observe the returns that investors actually receive ex post, after they...

Until recently, the trend in world capital markets has been toward increasing globalization. Recent events in Latin America and Asia have caused many in policy-making circles to question whether this trend should be wholly, or at least partially, reversed. It is commonly argued that—at a...

This study conducts experimental asset markets to examine the effects of circuit breaker rules on market behavior when agents are uncertain about the presence of private information. Our results unequivocally indicate that circuit breakers fail to temper unwarranted price movements in periods...

Motivated by the dollarization debate in Mexico, we estimate an identified vector autoregression for the Mexican economy using monthly data from 1976 to 1997, taking into account the changes in the monetary policy regime which occurred during this period. We find that 1) exogenous shocks to...

This paper reports the results of 15 experimental asset markets designed to investigate the effect of optimistic forecast bias on market behavior. Each market is organized as a double oral auction in which participants trade a single-period asset with uncertain value. Traders are informed of the...