Deviations of market participants forecasts from full-information rational expectations (FIRE) are usually specified to arise from limited information or irrationality. Relying on a novel theoretical characterization, we present empirical evidence that these specifications are inconsistent with...

Gennaioli and Shleifer (GS) have proposed diagnostic expectations (DE) as an empirically-based approach to specifying participants’ expectations, which, like REH, can be applied in every model. Beyond its supposedly general applicability, GS’s formalization of DE implies that participants...

This paper is concerned with asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimators for the discrete-time square-root process. This process and its generalizations are employed in financial literature as models for movements of asset prices. the considered process is nonergodic and therefore...

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, credit migration matrices, used in many credit risk and pricing applications, are typically assumed to be generated by a simple Markov process. Based on empirical evidence, we propose a parsimonious model that is a mixture of (two) Markov chains, where...

We explore how general economic conditions impact defaults and major credit rating changes by fitting reduced-form Cox intensity models with a broad range of macroeconomic and firm-specific ratings-related variables. For all corporate issuers in the period 1981–2002 we find both types of...