The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, and information technology allows arbitrageurs to trade faster than ever. But have market prices then become more informative? We use stock and bond prices to forecast earnings and find that the information content of...

This article investigates the risk-return relations of stocks traded in frontier markets, a class of small, illiquid, less accessible and less known emerging markets that has escaped the attention of many researchers. We examine the cross-section of risk premiums of 360 stocks traded in 19...

This paper provides a review and commentary on the current financial and economic crisis. It considers important analytical and policy issues from a global and North-South perspective. The analytical questions cover issues such as the better than expected performance of the world economy, the...

In the pre-World-War I period, lacking regulatory restrictions allowed ‘hidden' mergers however, some companies disclosed information voluntarily. I analyze insider gains by investigating the share price behavior prior to merger announcements. When companies hid information, stocks exhibited...

There is a long-standing debate as to whether the Fisher effect operated during the classical gold standard period. We break new ground on this question by developing a market-based measure of general inflation expectations during the gold standard. Since the gold-silver price ratio was widely...

This study measures the speed with which the aggregate stock market in 49 countries responds to global market-wide public information. Our empirical results show that there are wide variations in the aggregate price delay values over time and across countries. Subsequent panel analysis confirms...

For the past decade, the U.S. economy has been driven not by industrial investment but by a real estate bubble. Although the United States may seem to be the leading example of industrial capitalism, its economy is no longer based mainly on investing in capital goods to employ labor to produce...

The recent global financial crisis has caused massive upheavals worldwide. The papers in this volume analyze whether financial principles seem to have shifted in recent years, and what that may mean for international financial markets and regulation. What ¡°broke¡± in the current crisis? Is...

Basically, shadow banking is an original kind of business organization, or better a set of institutions and markets, finalized to disinvest fixed assets and convey them to the financial markets. Nowadays, tackling the subject means penetrating the hard core of financialization. Shadow banking...

Review of the book titled 'Rethinking Housing Bubbles The Role of Household and Bank Balance Sheets in Modeling Economic Cycles' by Steven D. Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith. Published by Cambridge University Press in May 2014.