What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given $25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61 young, quantitatively trained men and women to play this...

Home Bias refers to the tendency to invest more heavily in one's domestic equity market than global market-value proportions would suggest. Whether or not home-biased investing makes sense, the fact is that people in pretty much every country do it. This article addresses the question of whether...

Over the course of their professional lives, Henry E. Kyburg, Isaac Levi, and Jochen Runde have maintained the claim that J M Keynes’s contributions to probability and decision theory were of a comparative, qualitative nature only. They maintained that J M Keynes had some interesting, but...

In 1922, F.Y. Edgeworth asked the readers of the world’s leading philosophy journal Mind for help in analyzing Keynes’s conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c. Keynes had created the first decision rule in history that generalized the linear and additive expected value and expected...

It’s easy to overlook the fact that, in thinking about investment risk, we are implicitly making a choice about the benchmark against which risk is measured. It’s a convention, which we often take for granted, to use our local hard currency as the risk-less benchmark – but this choice,...

Gauss’ 1809 discussion of least squares, which can be viewed as the beginning of mathematical statistics, is reviewed. The general consensus seems to be that Gauss’ arguments are at fault, but we show that his reasoning is in fact correct, given his self-imposed restrictions, and...

The bedrock of financial economics is that there should be a tradeoff between risk and reward: an investment with low risk should have a low expected return, while one that could make you rich should also be one which could lose you a lot of money. A lot of research in finance is focused on...

The central question addressed in this note is whether it is better to sell (and re-purchase) appreciated assets now and pay today's long-term capital gains tax rate, or wait to realize gains in the future and pay a likely higher capital gains tax rate. The authors argue that a framework based...

Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010), a pioneering mathematician, created a new awareness of the chaos of nature - its randomness, irregular shapes, sharp edges, corners, and gaps. He developed the theory of fractals to describe these phenomena, and he also applied his concepts to financial markets....

Economic models are the tools of decision makers in governments and central banks. As such, they affect our everyday lives. But what is the actual track record of these models, and do they really work? Applying them in real time and validating them on a day-by-day basis leads to a clear...