I study a dynamic principal agent model in which the effort cost of the agent is unknown to the principal. The principal is ambiguity averse, and designs a contract which is robust to the worst case effort cost process. Ambiguity divides the contract into two regions. After sufficiently high...

There is a strong evidence that most of financial variables are better described by a combination of difusion and jump processes. Considering such evidence, researchers have studied security market models with jumps, in particular, in the context of option pricing. In most of their models, jump...

In a three-period finite competitive exchange economy with incomplete financial markets and retrading, we study the possibility of controlling asset price volatility through financial innovation. We first give sufficient conditions on preferences and endowments implying that whatever is the...

We show that the excessive use of hidden orders causes artificial price pressures and abnormal asset returns. Using a simple game-theoretical setting, we demonstrate that this effect naturally arises from mis-coordination in trading schedules between traders, when suppliers of liquidity do not...

This paper examines the two-fund separation paradigm in the context of an infinite-horizon general equilibrium model with dynamically complete markets and heterogeneous consumers with time- and state-separable utility functions. With the exception of the dynamic structure, we maintain the...

This paper studies whether sentiment is rewarded with a significant risk premium on the European stock markets. We examine several sentiment proxies and identify the Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) from the EU Commission as the most relevant sentiment proxy for our sample. The analysis is...

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is spurred by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with possible adverse effects to the real economy. To get insights into the size of the bubble, the house price evolution is...

We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to...

We solve and test experimentally a global-games model of speculative attacks where agents can choose whether to read, at a cost, a payoff irrelevant (sunspot) announcement. Assuming that subjects exogenously believe some others to follow sunspots, we provide conditions for a unique equilibrium...

This paper explores how selective default expectations affect the pricing of sovereign bonds in a historical laboratory: the German default of the 1930s. We analyze yield differentials between identical government bonds traded across various creditor countries before and after bond market...