Expectations affect economic decisions, and therefore inaccurate expectations are costly. Expectations can be wrong in ways that are systematic (bias) or unsystematic (noise). We provide a general method for quantifying the noise component. The method is based on the insight that theoretical...

We develop a new method for estimating the effective reproduction number of an infectious disease (R) and apply it to track the dynamics of COVID-19. The method is based on the fact that in the SIR model, R is linearly related to the growth rate of the number of infected individuals. This...

We develop a general framework for measuring biases in expectation formation. The method is based on the insight that biases can be inferred from the response of forecast errors to past news. Empirically, biases are measured by flexibly estimating the impulse response function of forecast...

This paper studies how the informational content of dividends is affected by leverage. While higher dividends convey good news at low levels of leverage, dividends become a bad signal when leverage is high. Quantitatively, a dividend increase is predicted to have a positive stock price reaction...

Expectations affect economic decisions, and inaccurate expectations are costly. Expectations can be wrong due to either bias (systematic mistakes) or noise (unsystematic mistakes). We develop a framework for quantifying the level of noise in survey expectations. The method is based on the...

Polluted rivers are harmful to human, animals and plants living along it. To reduce the harm, cleaning costs are generated. However, when the river passes through several different countries or regions, a relevant question is how should the costs be shared among the agents. Ni and Wang (2007)...