Using the framework provided by the asymmetric-information and real-options theories, we examine the impact of uncertainty on firms' decisions and market outcomes. We construct alternative measures of uncertainty based on survey of professional forecasters and our estimation of regression-based...

We show that investors acquire more public information about firms to which they are more socially proximate. On average, a standard deviation increase in the Social Connectedness Index (Bailey et al., 2018) between a firm's headquarter county and a searcher county is associated with 30% more...

We study a competitive model in which market incompleteness implies that debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature and default may lead to the sale of the firms’ assets at fire sale prices when markets are illiquid. This incompleteness is the only friction in the model and the...

This paper studies the effects on the asset price of the introduction of a public signal in the presence of asymmetric private information in a decentralized market. We introduce an artificial market model populated by boundedly rational agents with heterogeneous levels of reasoning:...

We study cryptocurrency in a monetary economy with imperfect information. The network imperfection provides traders opportunities to engage in double spending fraud, but the trackability of transaction messages allows us to impose proof-of-work (PoW), proof-of-stake (PoS), and currency exclusion...

Indeed, the world economy is a complex system that has undergone many different phases in the past century. Particularly, the African economy is undergoing a series of transformations (transitions) that subject the future to considerable uncertainty, complexity and unpredictability. In fact,...

Against the backdrop of the theories developed in the real options and financing constraints literatures, this paper examines the impact of profit uncertainty and sunk costs on firms’ entry and exit decisions. For our empirical analysis, we compile an extensive dataset containing information...

We develop a news-media textual measure of aggregate economic uncertainty, defined as the fraction of Financial Times articles that contain uncertainty-related keyphrases, at frequencies from daily to annual, from January 1982 to April 2014. We improve on existing similar measures in several...

We develop a news-media textual measure of aggregate economic uncertainty – the fraction of Financial Times articles containing uncertainty-related keyphrases – for 1982–2014 at daily to annual frequencies. We contribute to the literature in three areas. First, we provide a measurement...

We examine the impact of uncertainty on employment dynamics. Alternative measures of uncertainty are constructed based on the survey of professional forecasters, and regression-based forecasting models for GDP growth, inflation, S&P500 stock price index, and fuel prices. Our results indicate...