overreaction and underreaction in analysts forecasts abstract we examine hypotheses derived from behavioral decision theory regarding conditions that lead to overreaction and conditions that lead to underreaction in analysts earnings forecasts we argue that three heuristics jointly influence earnings forecasts leniency representativeness and anchoring and adjustment we present a model for the concurrent influence of these heuristics on forecast errors and examine three predictions of this model 1 that there is a tendency towards overreaction in forecast changes and underreaction in forecast revisions 2 that there is overreaction to positive forecast modifications and underreaction to negative forecast modifications and 3 that these biases increase with the forecast horizon

testing bayesian updating with the associated press top 25 most studies of bayesian updating use experimental data this article uses a non experimental data source the voter ballots of the associated press college football poll a weekly subjective ranking of the top 25 teams to test bayes rule as a descriptive model i find that voters sometimes underreact to new information sometimes overreact and at other times their behavior is consistent with estimated bayesian updating a unifying explanation for the disparate results is that voters are more responsive to information that is more salient i e noticeable in particular voters respond in a more bayesian way to losses and wins over ranked teams as compared to wins over unranked teams and voters seem unaware of subtle variation in the precision of priors jel d80 d83 d84

inflation growth and wage policy a brazilian perspective abstract a growth inflation model based on recent brazilian experience is developed the paper focuses on brazilian compulsory wage policy in order to analyse current stabilization policy issues in this context it is argued that orthodox stabilization policies as exemplified by an autonomous reduction in the rate of monetary growth implies both a temporary and a permanent decrease in output growth if the wage formula as in brazil provides for lagged price indexation the idea of promoting stabilization through full wage indexation is also examined

can nontradables generate substantial home bias the past decade has witnessed an increase in the fraction of equity portfolios invested abroad as barriers to international asset trade have significantly declined what are the long run implications of this process in this paper we investigate to what extent nontradables consumption and leisure can affect the portfolio allocation decision in otherwise integrated capital markets we find that hedging against nontradables shocks can account for only a small portfolio bias toward domestic assets these results suggest that in the near future we can expect to observe sizable additional international diversification

trying to explain home bias in equities and consumption investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest a phenomenon called equity home bias in the absence of this bias investors would optimally diversify domestic output risk using foreign equities therefore consumption growth rates would tend to co move across countries even when output growth rates do not empirically however consumption growth rates tend to have a lower correlation across countries than do output growth rates a phenomenon i call consumption home bias in this paper i discuss these two biases and their potential relationship as suggested by the literature

a new perspective on the new rule of the current account abstract in an influential series of contributions kraay and ventura 2000 2003 offer a new rule for the current account in response to a temporary income shock the change in the current account is equal to the change in saving times the ratio of net foreign assets to wealth we analyze the impact of a temporary income shock on the current account in the context of a two country dynamic general equilibrium model of portfolio choice and show that the new rule does not hold we also show that the cross section evidence reported by kraay and ventura in favor of the new rule is a feature implied by the steady state of the model that is conceptually distinct from the new rule we argue that the new rule could only hold in a model with one way capital flows only inflows or outflows but not both a feature that is strongly counterfactual

home bias in global bond and equity markets the role of real exchange rate volatility abstract this paper focuses on the role of real exchange rate volatility as a driver of portfolio home bias and in particular as an explanation for differences in home bias across financial assets we present a markowitz type portfolio selection model in which real exchange rate volatility induces a bias towards domestic financial assets as well as a stronger home bias for assets with low local currency return volatility we find empirical support in favour of this hypothesis for a broad set of industrialized and emerging market countries not only is real exchange rate volatility an important factor behind bilateral portfolio home bias but we find that a reduction of monthly real exchange rate volatility from its sample mean to zero reduces bond home bias by up to 60 percentage points while it reduces equity home bias by only 20 percentage points

home bias in equity portfolios inflation hedging and international capital market equilibrium we test whether the home bias in equity portfolios is caused by investors trying to hedge inflation risk the empirical evidence is consistent with this motive only if investors have very high levels of risk tolerance and equity returns are negatively correlated with domestic inflation we then develop a model of international portfolio choice and equity market equilibrium that integrates inflation risk and deadweight costs using this model we estimate the levels of costs required to generate the observed home bias in portfolios consistent with different levels of risk aversion for a level of risk aversion consistent with standard estimates of the domestic equity market risk premium these costs are about a few percent per annum greater than observable costs such as withholding taxes thus the home bias cannot be explained by either inflation hedging or direct observable costs of international investment unless investors have very low levels of risk aversion article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

inertial inflation and the cruzado plan abstract on 28 january 1986 the brazilian goverment decided to freeze all prices this article examines the heterodox shock and the development by brazilian economist of the theory of inertial inflation which served as a theoretical basis for the shock

towards a theory of current accounts the current accounts data of industrial countries exhibits some strong patterns that are inconsistent with the intertemporal approach to the current account this is the basic model that international economists have been using for more than two decades to think about current account issues this paper shows that it is possible to go a long way towards reconciling the theory and the data by introducing two additional features to the basic model investment risk and adjustment costs to investment moreover these extensions generate new and unexpected theoretical predictions that receive substantial support in the data the overall message is therefore positive with a couple of reasonable modifications the intertemporal approach to the current account provides a fairly good description of the industrial country data

financial integration and the wealth effect of exchange rate fluctuations abstract recent years have witnessed a large increase in international financial integration in the form of largely offsetting cross holdings across countries we assess how such financial leverage affects the international transmission of monetary shocks and find that it leads to sizable welfare differentials that far exceed the impact due to nominal rigidities we document the relevance of the exact nature of holdings with bond holdings associated with larger effects than equity holdings the impact of financial leverage on welfare is also sensitive to the extent of exchange rate pass through and the substitutability between goods produced in different countries

country portfolio dynamics this paper presents a general approximation method for characterizing timevarying equilibrium portfolios in a two country dynamic general equilibrium model the method can be easily adapted to most dynamic general equilibrium models it applies to environments in which markets are complete or incomplete and it can be used for models of any dimension moreover the approximation provides simple easily interpretable closed form solutions for the dynamics of equilibrium portfolios

composition and growth effects of the current account a synthesized portfolio view abstract this paper analyzes a useful accounting framework that breaks down the current account to two components a composition effect and a growth effect we show that past empirical evidence which strongly supports the growth effect as the main driver of current account dynamics is misconceived the remarkable empirical success of the growth effect is driven by the dominance of the cross sectional variation which under conditions met by the data is generated by an accounting approximation in contrast to previous findings that the portfolio share of net foreign assets to total assets is constant in a country both our theoretical and empirical results support a highly persistent process or a unit root process with some countries displaying a trend finally we reestablish the composition effect as the quantitatively dominant driving force of current account dynamics in the past data

financial markets forecasts revisited are they rational stubborn or jumpy this paper evaluates professional forecasters behavior using a panel data of individual forecasts we find that i professional forecasts are behavioral and ii there exists a stock bond dissonance the forecasting behavior seems to be stubborn in the stock market but jumpy in the bond market even in the same country forecasting behavior is quite different by market

loss function assumptions in rational expectations tests on financial analysts earnings forecasts abstract prior research concludes that financial analysts do not process public information efficiently in generating their earnings forecasts the ordinary least squares ols regression based tests used in prior studies assume implicitly that analysts face a quadratic loss function in contrast we argue that analysts likely face a linear loss function and hence try to minimize their absolute forecast errors we conduct and compare rational expectations tests using these two alternative loss functions we reproduce most prior findings of forecast inefficiency with ols regressions but find virtually no evidence of forecast inefficiency with least absolute deviation regressions where we explicitly assume a linear loss function

robustness information processing constraints and the current account in small open economies article i nfo in this paper we examine the effects of two types of induced uncertainty model uncertainty due to robust ness rb and state uncertainty due to finite information processing capacity called rational inattention or ri on consumption and the current account we show that the combination of rb and ri improves the model s predictions for i the contemporaneous correlation between the current account and income and ii the volatility and persistence of the current account in small open emerging and developed economies in addition we show that the two informational frictions improve the model s ability to match the impulse response of consumption to income and the relative volatility of consumption to income growth

the hungarian hyperinflation and stabilization of 1945 1946 inflation in hungary after world war ii was the most intense on record the reforms of august 1946 were immediately and entirely successful in stabilizing prices this paper describes and analyzes the unique policies and institutions that produced these phenomena despite its severity the hungarian experience was consistent with the less extreme inflation and stabilization experiences examined by sargent price stabilization was accomplished by fiscal rather than purely monetary measures and was paradoxically accompanied by rapid and prolonged money growth

international capital flows under dispersed private information abstract it is well established that private information is critical to our understanding of asset prices in this paper we argue that it also affects international capital flows and use a simple two country dsge model to illustrate its impact we show that private information i increases the volatility of both net and gross capital flows ii leads to a high correlation between capital inflows and outflows iii leads to a disconnect of capital flows from observed macro fundamentals and iv implies that capital flows contain information about the future macro fundamentals we also show that dispersed information affects capital flows both through asset prices and directly so that the impact on flows is not just the mirror image of the impact on prices

when failure becomes success class and the debate over stabilization and adjustment abstract this article criticizes the current debate over stabilization and adjustment and develops an alternative class analytic approach first the respective theories and policy recommendations of neoclassical and structuralist economist are analyzed then the article considers the recent experiences of argentina brazil and peru where orthodox and heterodox policies have been attempted and subsequently declared failures finally it is shown that those failures with respect to employment inflation and the balance of payments become successes to the extent that they involve increasing exploitation and otherwise strengthening the class aspects of capitalism

shortages and price decontrol considers a study which analyzed the impact of the political process on the dynamics of reform with a background on the economics of reform data and methods used findings and its implications

do domestic investors have an information advantage evidence from indonesia using transaction data from the jakarta stock exchange i find three pieces of evidence which indicate that domestic investors have an information advantage over foreign investors first foreign investors systematically buy at higher and sell at lower intra day prices than domestic investors second foreign investors tend to sell prior to large positive returns finally the permanent impact of foreign purchases is smaller than that of domestic purchases over time prices at which foreign investors trade have worsened while foreign selling prior to positive returns has disappeared

capital inflow surges in emerging economies how worried should latin america and the caribbean be in the years leading up to the global economic crisis latin america and the caribbean received large capital inflows nonetheless the region survived the albeit short lived dramatic events of 2007 09 reasonably well with no financial crisis in any of the larger economies after the crisis capital inflows rose again in 2010 gross inflows to seven latin american countries argentina brazil chile colombia mexico peru and venezuela amounted to more than 6 percent of gross domestic product gdp and net inflows exceeded 3 percent of gdp more recently following the may 2013 speech of then chairman of the u s federal reserve ben bernanke there has been concern regarding the potential effects of tapering asset purchases by the u s federal reserve system and rising interest rates possibly spelling the end of large capital inflows to the latin american and caribbean region the literature on capital inflows suggests that while these flows represent an opportunity to spur investment and growth they may also increase vulnerability to financial crises macroeconomic instability and ultimately recession a relevant question then is whether the region can declare victory in being able to manage large capital inflows successfully or whether risks remain that justify strong measures our starting point is that the region has enjoyed strong surges in capital inflows we therefore decided to condition the analysis on surges occurring we do not seek to explain the reasons for such a surge one justification for this decision is that capital flows appear to be driven as much if not more by push rather than pull factors more specifically we seek to understand what determines whether such surges end in either a banking crisis or a recession while there is a substantial literature on the determinants of capital inflows their potential impacts have received much less attention the contribution of this paper is to analyze when inflow surges may end in severe economic problems including financial or macroeconomic instability rather than to identify the determinants of those surges we must first tackle the question of how to define a capital inflow surge we are helped in this regard by a small but growing literature however the current definitions of inflow surges in the literature may be injudicious we propose a new definition which considers the total size of the inflow episode across countries we also employ a more traditional definition based on yearby year inflows relative to a country specific threshold we contrast relevant statistics on the identified episodes using these two definitions and compare our episodes with others found in the literature we also consider whether the analysis should be conducted using gross or net inflows we take the view that employing net flows may discard useful information and that gross flows are relevant where financial instability is a potential concern even if net flows are zero a domestic financial system may intermediate large gross inflows when domestic residents purchase assets abroad we choose to focus on gross inflows but we include gross outflows as a potential explanatory variable so as not to lose information 1the empirical analysis in this paper develops a set of parsimonious models that discriminate reasonably well between the different economic outcomes we then analyze the case of a typical country from the region with a recent capital inflow surge providing a set of simulations to illustrate the economic magnitude of our results we simulate the changes in the estimated probabilities of negative outcomes given changes in certain critical variables we suggest that depending on the country inflow characteristics different policy measures may then be justified however a caveat is that emerging economies in general and latin america and the caribbean in particular have been experimenting with new policy measures and we are not able to evaluate their potential effectiveness in this paper

international capital flows abstract the surge in international asset trade since the early 1990s has lead to renewed interest in models with international portfolio choice we develop the implications of portfolio choice for both gross and net international capital flows in the context of a simple two country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model we focus on the time variation in portfolio allocation following shocks and resulting capital flows endogenous time variation in expected returns and risk which are the key determinants of portfolio choice affect capital flows in often subtle ways the model is consistent with a broad range of empirical evidence an additional contribution of the paper is to overcome the technical difficulty of solving dsge models with portfolio choice by developing a broadly applicable solution method

gravity in international finance abstract the past decade has witnessed an explosion of papers estimating gravity equations for cross border financial holdings without much of a theoretical foundation in this paper we develop a theory for bilateral asset holdings that takes a gravity form we discuss how to estimate international financial frictions and conduct comparative statics analysis within the context of the theory we also find though that reasonable extensions of the model no longer generate a gravity form while this does not significantly complicate estimation and comparative statics analysis it raises questions about the empirical validity of gravity specifications for cross border financial holdings that need to be addressed in future work

information and capital flows the determinants of transactions in financial assets abstract we show that a gravity model explains international transactions in financial assets at least as well as goods trade transactions our results support the hypothesis that informational asymmetries are responsible for the strong negative relationship between asset trade and distance this result is very important for theories of asset trade portfolio adjustments and home bias we strengthen it by investigating the roles of explicit informational variables as well as distance in explaining separately cross border trade in corporate equities corporate bonds and government bonds

when do the usda forecasters make mistakes this study analysed forecasts for all us corn soya bean and wheat categories published within the world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde reports over the 1987 88 through 2009 10 marketing years in an attempt to identify patterns and better understand when the usda forecasters make mistakes two general sources of errors were investigated behavioural and macroeconomic factors the first objective was to examine how these factors affect the size of the forecast error and the second concentrated on the direction of the error due to these effects our findings suggest that the largest increase in the size of usda forecast errors was associated with structural changes in commodity markets that took place in the mid 2000s corn soya bean and wheat forecast errors also grew during the periods of economic growth and with changes in exchange rates while inflation and changes in oil price had a much smaller impact with respect to behavioural sources we identified patterns consistent with leni

a panel project on purchasing power parity mean reversion within and between countries abstract previous time series studies have shown evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates deviations from purchasing power parity ppp appear to have half lives of approximately four years however the long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies and are potentially inappropriate because of regime changes in this study we re examine deviations from ppp using a panel of 150 countries and 45 annual post wwii observations our panel shows strong evidence of mean reversion that is similar to that from long time series ppp deviations are eroded at a rate of approximately 15 annually i e their half life is around four years such findings can be masked in time series data but are relatively easy to find in cross sections

the external wealth of nations measures of foreign assets and liabilities for industrial and developing countries abstract although capital flows are closely monitored surprisingly little is known about the accumulated stocks of foreign assets and liabilities held by various countries especially in the developing world this paper constructs estimates of foreign assets and liabilities and their equity and debt subcomponents for a sample of 67 industrial and developing countries it characterizes the stylized facts of international balance sheets and asks whether there are trends in net foreign asset positions and shifts in debt equity ratios over time finally it explores the sensitivity of estimated stock positions to the treatment of valuation effects not captured in balance of payments data

location matters an examination of trading profits the electronic trading system xetra of the german security exchange provides a unique data source on the equity trades of 756 professional traders located in 23 different cities and eight european countries we explore informational asymmetries across the trader population traders located outside germany in non german speaking cities show lower proprietary trading profit their underperformance is not only statistically significant it is also of economically significant magnitude and occurs for the 11 largest german blue chip stocks we also examine whether a trader location in frankfurt as the financial center or local proximity of the trader to the corporate headquarters of the traded stock or affiliation with a large financial institution results in superior trading performance the data provide no evidence for a financial center advantage or of increasing institutional scale economies in proprietary trading however we find evidence for an information advantage due to corporate headquarters proximity for high frequency intraday trading

current accounts in debtor and creditor countries the authors reexamine a classic question in international economics what is the current account response to a transitory income shock such as a temporary improvement in the terms of trade a transfer from abroad or unusually high production to answer this question they construct a world equilibrium model in which productivity varies across countries and international borrowing and lending take place to exploit good investment opportunities despite its conventional ingredients the model generates the novel prediction that favorable income shocks lead to current account deficits in debtor countries and current account surpluses in creditor countries evidence from thirteen oecd countries broadly supports this theoretical prediction

why is capital so immobile internationally possible explanations and implications for capital income taxation the evidence on international capital immobility is extensive including the lack of international portfolio diversification real interest differentials across countries and the high correlation between domestic savings and investment the authors develop a model with asymmetric information between countries that helps rationalize all the above observations and then examine the implications of this model for optimal domestic tax policy without asymmetric information past work showed that small open economies should not impose corporate income taxes with asymmetric information the optimal policy instead involves government subsidies to capital imports some omitted factors that argue against subsidizing capital imports are explored briefly copyright 1996 by american economic association

testing the rationality of japanese gdp forecasts the sign of forecast revision matters abstract this paper analyzes the rationality of japanese gdp forecasts of individual economists it finds that japanese forecasters are pessimistic optimistic when their forecast revisions frs are positive negative and that they always over react to new information across forecasters the magnitude of average fr is not correlated with the magnitude of average forecast errors fe these results together are consistent with neither the rational expectations hypothesis nor reputation models with rational and strategic forecasters

canaries and vultures a quantitative history of monetary mismanagement in brazil during the last two decades of the twentieth century brazil went through a sequence of failed stabilization plans that tried to cope with an enduring hyperinflation this paper uses a money demand model to evaluate monetary policies during those episodes consistency between money supply and expected conditional money demand growth rates is considered for each plan it is shown that unsuccessful programs were marked by excessive liquidity the results not only suggest that monetary mismanagement led to the failure of the plans but also that the excessive liquidity could have been predicted