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...

We investigate the impact of measures of uncertainty on firms’ capital investment behavior using a panel of U.S. firms. Increases in firmspecific and CAPM -based measures have a significant negative effect on investment spending, while market-based uncertainty has a positive impact.

I model a scenario in which investors do not know the payoff distributions of relatively newer firms and use the payoff distribution of similar well-established firms as starting points. The starting distributions are then adjusted for size, volatility, and other differences. Anchoring bias (Tversky and Kahneman (1974)) implies that such adjustments typically fall short. I show that adjusting c...

1. Introduction " ...each man possesses opinions about the future, which go by the general name of expectations... " (Plato, Laws 644c, 360 BC) Human behaviour is determined by expectations of future outcomes. While monetary policy discussions have focused almost exclusively on expectations about future inflation, the economic behaviour of households and businesses is driven by expectations abo...

We show that the external habit-formation model economy of Campbell and Cochrane ~1999! can explain why the Capital Asset Pricing Model ~CAPM! and its extensions are better approximate asset pricing models than is the standard consumptionbased model. The model economy produces time-varying expected returns, tracked by the dividend–price ratio. Portfolio-based models capture some of this variati...

We examine the relation between US stock market returns and the US business cycle for the period 1960 2003. We identify two channels in the transmission mechanism. One is through the mean of stock returns via the equity risk premium, and the other is through the volatility of returns. We find that the relation is asymmetric with downturns in the business cycle having a greater negative impact o...

this study empirically examines whether managers manipulate reported income through the timing of sales of long-lived assets and investments. several empirical implications of the income-smoothing and debt-equity hypothesis in the context of asset sales were tested. the findings are consistent with the timing of asset sales by managers so that the recognized accounting income from these sales s...

Trading at prices above the fundamental value of an asset, i.e. a bubble, has been verified and replicated in laboratory asset markets for the past seven years. To date, only common group experience provides minimal conditions for common investor sentiment and trading at fundamental value. Rational expectations models do not predict the bubble and crash phenomena found in these experimental mar...