Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We model this behavior as familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases. More importantly, equilibrium stock prices reflect an unfamiliarity premium. In an international setting, our model predicts t...

This paper derives a key monotonicity property common to all dividend signalling models: the greater the rate that dividend income is taxed relative to capital gains income, the greater the value of information revealed by a given dividend, and hence the greater the associated excess return. This monotonicity condition is tested with robust non-parametric techniques. No evidence is found to sup...

The high prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome in sub-Saharan Africa has resulted in a dramatic increase in orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) over the past decade. These children typically rely on extended family networks for support, but the magnitude of the crisis has resulted in traditional familial networks becoming overwhelmed and more economica...

The study conducted in the state of West Bengal has identified the determinants and constraints to livelihood diversification among different livelihood groups. The study has shown that household-head experience (age), educational level, social status, training, asset position, access to credit, rural infrastructure, agroclimatic condition and the overall level of economic development of a regi...

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is currently using a Web-based experimentation environment to support laboratory activities in engineering education. The key service for the acceptance of the learning modalities and the appropriation of the environment by the students is a shared electronic notebook called the eJournal. This service is not only used by students to perform th...

We put forward a general equilibrium model that links the cross-section variation of expected returns to …rms’life cycle dynamics. In the model all assets have the same exposure to short-run consumption risks, but di¤er in their exposure to long-run consumption risks (Bansal and Yaron (2004)). An econometrician who uses conditional CAPM regression to predict asset returns will obtain higher for...