We study the consequences of indexing, i.e. commiting to invest in risky assets only via the market portfolio. We extend the canonical rational expectations model (Grossman and Stiglitz, 1980) to allow for multiple assets and endowment shocks, and show that indexing imposes a negative externality on other uninformed agents. More indexing makes informed trading on the market more profitable, whi...

We are the first paper to analyse and confirm the existence and extent of rational informational herding and rational informational contrarianism in a financial market experiment, and to compare and contrast these with the equivalent irrational phenomena. In our study, subjects generally behaved according to benchmark rationality. Moreover, traders who should herd or be contrarian in theory are...

The overvaluation hypothesis (Miller 1977) predicts that a) stocks are overvalued when there are short selling restrictions and that b) the overvaluation is increasing in the degree of divergence of opinion. We design an experiment that allows us to test these predictions in the laboratory. Our results support the hypothesis that prices are higher in the presence of short selling constraints. T...

The paper analyses a simplified version of a Glosten-Milgrom style specialist security trading model with trade-timing. In a setting where traders are differentially informed, if the best-informed investors have a sufficiently strong or weak impact on prices then the investors with the strongest impact on prices delay their investment strategically, pretending to be the low-impact types. JEL Cl...

This paper aims at improved accuracy in testing for long-run predictability in noisy series, such as stock market returns. Long-horizon regressions have previously been the dominant approach in this area. We suggest an alternative method that yields more accurate results. We find evidence of predictability in S&P 500 returns even when the confidence intervals are constructed using model-free me...

We analyze the ups and downs in economic growth recent decades by constructing a model with recurrent bubbles, crashes, endogenous growth. Once realized, bubbles crowd investment stimulate growth, but expectation about future crowds out reduces identify bubbly episodes estimating using US data. Counterfactual simulations suggest that IT housing not only caused booms also lifted GDP almost 2 per...

A 3-week coliphage survey was conducted in stool samples from 140 Bangladeshi children hospitalized with severe diarrhea. On the Escherichia coli indicator strain K803, all but one phage isolate had 170-kb genomes and the morphology of T4 phage. In spot tests, the individual T4-like phages infected up to 27 out of 40 diarrhea-associated E. coli, representing 22 O serotypes and various virulence...

This article proposes a functional dynamic factor model for the evaluation of the impact of scalar– and curve–valued factors on the shapes of intraday price curves. The asymptotic theory leads to practically useful confidence intervals for the factor coefficients. The main findings pertain to the impact of the shapes of intraday oil futures on the shapes of intraday prices of blue chip stocks. ...