This paper provides new evidence in support of the idea that bouts of optimism and pessimism drive much of US business cycles. In particular, we begin by using sign-restriction based identification schemes to isolate innovations in optimism or pessimism and we document the extent to which such...

Data for OECD countries document: 1. imports and exports are about three times as volatile as GDP; 2. imports and exports are pro-cyclical, and positively correlated with each other; 3. net exports are counter-cyclical. Standard models fail to replicate the behavior of imports and exports,...

Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main...

This paper studies the role of reference-dependent preferences in explaining several anomalies related to lottery-like assets. Recent studies find that lottery-like assets significantly underperform non-lottery-like assets, probably due to investors' unconditional preference for lottery-like...

This paper provides empirical evidence that emerging market economies adjust capital flow management in response to U.S. monetary policy shocks. Using these shocks as exogenous instruments, we find that such adjustments cause changes to portfolio capital flows — in particular, a one standard...

This paper provides empirical evidence that emerging market economies adjust capital flow management in response to U.S. monetary policy shocks. Using these shocks as exogenous instruments, we find that such adjustments cause changes to portfolio capital flows — in particular, a one standard...