Traders in global markets operate at different local times-of-day. This implies heterogeneity in circadian timing and likely sleepiness or alertness of those traders operating at less or more optimal times of the day, respectively. This, in turn, may lead to differences in both individual-level trader behavior as well as market level outcomes. We examined these factors by administering single-location and global sessions of an online asset market experiment that regularly produces mispricing and valuation bubbles. Global sessions involved real time trades between subjects in New Zealand and the U.S (i.e., “global” markets) with varied local times of day for each location. Individual traders at suboptimal times of day (or, “circadian mismatched” traders) engaged in riskier trading strategies, such as holding shares (the riskier asset) in later trading rounds and mispricing shares to a greater degree. These strategies resulted in lower earnings for circadian mismatched traders, especially in heterogeneous markets that also included traders at more optimal times-of-day. These differences were also reflected in market level outcomes. Markets with higher circadian mismatch heterogeneity across traders were more likely to exhibit longer lasting asset bubbles and greater share turnover volume. Overall, our results draw attention to a unique, but underappreciated, factor present across traders in global market environments, namely, differences in sleepiness across traders. Thus, this study hopes to highlight the role of circadian mismatch in attempting to understand trader behavior and, ultimately, market volatility.

This study investigates the contribution of financial frictions in term premiums on long-term bonds within a production economy. We consider a New Keynesian model, featuring an agency problem between financial intermediaries and their private creditors and generalized recursive preferences. The model predicts that financial frictions that amplify the impact of structural shocks on key macroeconomic variables increase term premiums under our baseline calibration. Furthermore, financial frictions produce a larger term premium when monetary policy is geared toward output over inflation stability. The novel mechanism that financial frictions increase term premiums are associated with the bank balance sheet channel of monetary policy.

We examine how rewards and penalties under tournament incentives impact price behaviour in experimental asset markets. Adding a penalty to a reward-only contract, or a reward to a penalty-only contract, changes the traders’ behaviour. The experimental markets with adjusted contracts experience less trading, but longer-lived and larger bubbles. This observed effect of penalties is consistent with herd-driven behaviour under relative performance evaluation, while the effect of rewards reflects the influence of the convexity of bonuses. However, these effects dissipate with trader experience. Our findings contribute to the debate attributing market instability to incentive structures in the finance industry.

Monetary incentives are a procedural pillar in experimental economics. By applying four distinct monetary incentive schemes in three experimental finance applications, we investigate the impact of an incentive scheme’s salience on results and elicit subjects’ perception of the experienced scheme. We find (1) no differences in results between salient schemes but a significant impact if the incentive scheme is non-salient. (2) The number of previous participations has a significant impact on the perception of the incentive scheme by subjects: it strongly correlates with subjects’ motives for participation, positively contributes to subjects’ understanding of the incentive scheme, but has no influence on subjects’ motivation within the experiment. (3) Subjects favor more salient over less- or non-salient schemes in the gain domain and negatively evaluate high salience in the loss domain.

We construct asset markets that are similar to those studied by Smith, Suchanek and Williams (Econometrica. 56, 1119-1151) in which bubbles and crashes tended to occur. The main difference between the markets studied here and those studied by Smith et al. is that in the markets studied here, the fundamental value of the asset is constant over the entire life of the asset. In four of the eight sessions reported here, we observe bubbles, which are prices considerably higher than fundamental values. The data suggest that the frequent payment of dividends is a major cause of bubble formation. The property that the fundamental value remains constant over the course of the trading horizon is not sufficient to eliminate the possibility of a bubble.

We implement a laboratory financial market where traders can access costly technology that reduces communication latency with a remote exchange. In this environment, we conduct a market design study on high-frequency trading: we contrast the performance of the newly proposed frequent batch auction (FBA) against the continuous double auction (CDA), which organizes trades in most exchanges worldwide. Our evidence suggests that, relative to the CDA, the FBA exhibits (1) less predatory trading behavior, (2) lower investments in low-latency communication technology, (3) lower transaction costs, and (4) lower volatility in market spreads and liquidity. We also find that transitory shocks in the environment have substantially greater impact on market dynamics in the CDA than in the FBA.

We present an experiment designed to test the Modigliani-Miller theorem. Applying a general equilibrium approach and not allowing for arbitrage among firms with different capital structures, we find that, in accordance with the theorem, participants well recognize changes in the systematic risk of equity associated with increasing leverage and, accordingly, demand higher rate of return. Yet, this adjustment is not perfect: subjects underestimate the systematic risk of low-leveraged equity whereas they overestimate the systematic risk of high-leveraged equity, resulting in a U-shaped cost of capital. A (control) individual decision-making experiment, eliciting several points on individual demand and supply curves for shares, provides some support for the theorem.

In an experimental setting in which investors can entrust their money to traders, we investigate how compensation schemes affect liquidity provision and asset prices, two outcomes that are important for financial stability. Compensation schemes can drive a wedge between how investors and traders value the asset. Limited liability makes traders value the asset more than investors. To limit losses, investors should thus restrict liquidity provision to force traders to trade at a lower price. By contrast, bonus caps make traders value the asset less than investors. This should encourage liquidity provision and increase prices. In contrast to these predictions, we find that under limited liability investors increase liquidity provision and asset price bubbles are larger. Bonus caps have no clear effect on liquidity provision and they fail to tame bubbles. Overall, giving traders skin in the game fosters financial stability.

There is substantial evidence that the decisions of experienced and inexperienced agents differ in ways that impact both individual earnings and aggregate market outcomes. Typically, such evidence is gathered by studying experience as it accumulates within subjects over time. We examine a new question; whether behaviors associated with experience can be transferred directly to new market participants. Specifically, we study the intergenerational transmission of information, including direct advice, in experimental asset markets. Empirical results suggest that advice is a substitute for experience. Prices in sessions with advised traders shift towards fundamentals—a pattern consonant with prior work exploring the impact of own-experience on pricing dynamics. Further, convergence is observed in mixed-markets where only a subset of traders are advised.

We compare uniform price auctions with fixed price offerings in Initial Public Offerings (IPO) using laboratory experiments. The experimental environment is based on the Biais and Faugeron-Grouzet (J. Financ. Intermed. 11:9-36, 2002) model. Standard predictions based on tacit collusion equilibria (TCE) suggest lower revenues in uniform price auctions, although alternative equilibria allow for higher revenues. In our experiment, there is no evidence that TCE are played. The experiment suggests that the uniform price auctions are superior to fixed price offerings in terms of raising revenues.

In the world of mutual funds management, responsibility for investment decisions is increasingly entrusted to small teams instead of individuals. Yet the effect of team decision-making in a market environment has never been studied in a controlled experiment. In this paper, we investigate the effect of team decision-making in an asset market experiment that has long been known to reliably generate price bubbles and crashes in markets populated by individuals. We find that this tendency is substantially reduced when each decision-making unit is instead a team of two. This holds across a broad spectrum of measures of the severity of mispricing, both under a continuous double-auction institution and in a call market. The result is not driven by reduced turnover due to time required for deliberation by teams, and continues to hold even when subjects are experienced. Our result also holds not only when our teams treatments are compared to the ‘narrow’ baseline provided by the corresponding individuals treatments, but also when compared more broadly to the results of the large body of previous research on markets of this kind.

We study with the help of a laboratory experiment the conditions under which an uninformed manipulator—a robot trader that unconditionally buys several shares of a common value asset in the beginning of a trading period and unwinds this position later on—is able to induce higher asset prices. We find that the average price is significantly higher in the presence of the manipulator if and only if the asset takes the lowest possible value and insiders receive perfect information about the true value of the asset. It is also evidenced that the robot trader makes trading gains. Finally, both uninformed and partially informed traders may suffer from the presence of the robot.

We study price efficiency and trading behavior in laboratory limit order markets with asymmetrically informed traders. Markets differ in the number of insiders present and in the subset of traders who receive information about the number of insiders present. We observe that price efficiency (i) is the higher the higher the number of insiders in the market but (ii) is unaffected by changes in the subset of traders who know about the number of insiders present. (iii) Independent of the number of insiders, price efficiency increases gradually over time. (iv) The insiders’ information is reflected in prices via limit (market) orders if the asset’s value is inside (outside) the bid-ask spread. (v) In situations where limit and market orders yield positive profits, insiders clearly prefer market orders, indicating a strong desire for immediate transactions.

We use a comprehensive new dataset of asset-class returns in 38 developed countries to examine a popular class of retirement spending rules that prescribe annual withdrawals as a constant percentage of the retirement account balance. A 65-year-old couple willing to bear a 5 percent chance of financial ruin can withdraw just 2.31 percent per year, a rate materially lower than conventional advice (e.g., the 4% rule). Our estimates of failure rates under conventional withdrawal policies have important implications for individuals (e.g., savings rates, retirement timing, and retirement consumption), public policy (e.g., participation rates in means-tested programs), and society (e.g., elderly poverty rates).

We report a laboratory experiment that investigates the impact of passive participation on bubble formation in asset markets with inexperienced and experienced traders. Some treatments employ pre-market training in which each participant is ‘matched’ with a trader from a different prior market and observes all trading details but does not directly participate in trading. We find that passive participation, similar to direct experience, significantly reduces mispricing in subsequent markets. This finding suggests that observation of prices is a key mechanism through which experience mitigates bubbles. We also vary whether transaction prices are displayed in a column of text or in a graphical display, and find that among inexperienced and once-experienced traders, markets with the tabular display result in bubbles that are greater in amplitude relative to markets with the graphical display.

Experimental asset markets with a constant fundamental value ($\mathrm{F}\mathrm{V}$) have grown in importance in recent years. A methodological examination of the robustness of experimental results in such a setting which has been shown to produce bubbles, however, is lacking. In a laboratory experiment with 280 subjects, we investigate whether specific design features are sufficient to influence experimental results. In detail, we (1) vary the visual representation of the price chart, and (2) provide subjects with full information about the FV process. We find overvaluation and bubble formation to be reduced when trading prices are displayed at the upper end of the price chart. Surprisingly, we do not find any effects when subjects have full information about the FV process.

We study how Spanish equity investors assessed firms’ exposure to political risk during the regime change of the 1930s. We show that shifts in political uncertainty regularly predicted a general deterioration of future investment opportunities in the stock market. However, we also find that firms differed in their sensitivity to uncertainty, reflecting important differences in their perceived exposures to political risk. The negative impact of uncertainty was significantly milder for firms with political connections to republican parties. The price of some stocks increased in periods of heightened uncertainty, thus allowing investors to hedge against reinvestment risk. In the case of firms that became targets of hostile political actions, we observe that investors frequently adjusted their assessment of individual stocks to changes in firm-specific political circumstances. Over the whole period of the Second Republic, investors' systematic preference for safer equity hedges led to a continuous decline in the price of stocks perceived as more exposed to political risk.

This paper examines how credit guarantees and government subsidies impact investment in a regime-switching model. We provide new explicit pricing formulas for a general standard asset. Almost all common corporate securities’ prices can be easily derived by the explicit formulas though project cash flows are driven by both a Brownian motion and a two-state Markov chain. We provide a method about how governments should specify a proper tax subsidy standard for a given tax rate to motivate a firm to invest in a project in the way they wish. If the tax subsidy is sufficiently high (low), an overinvestment (underinvestment) occurs. The higher the tax rate, the more significant the overinvestment (underinvestment). We pin down the subsidy amount required for motivating a firm to invest immediately and fix the optimal capital structure with government subsidies.

We propose a stock market model with chartists, fundamentalists and market makers. Chartists chase stock price trends, fundamentalists bet on mean reversion, and market makers adjust stock prices to reflect current excess demand. Fundamentalists’ perception of the stock market’s fundamental value is subject to animal spirits. As long as the stock market is relatively stable, fundamentalists neutrally believe in a normal fundamental value. However, fundamentalists optimistically (pessimistically) believe in a high (low) fundamental value when the stock market rises (falls) sharply. Our framework may produce boom-bust stock market dynamics that coevolve with waves of optimism and pessimism for parameter settings that would ensure globally stable stock market dynamics in the absence of animal spirits. Responsible for such a surprising outcome is the destabilizing nature of temporarily attracting virtual fixed points, brought about by animal spirits.

Monetary policy in the USA affects borrowing costs for state and local governments, incentivizing municipal borrowing and spending, which in turn affects economic outcomes. Using municipal bond indices and transaction-level data, I find that responses to monetary policy are dampened relative to treasuries and heterogeneous across location and bond characteristics. In my baseline estimate, muni yields move 26 bp after a 100 bp monetary shock. To study implications for local fiscal policy, I model US localities as small open economies in a monetary union with independent fiscal agents. In a calibrated model, monetary transmission is significantly affected by municipal borrowing costs.