Essay about Choices: Economics and Financial Transaction Data

Submitted By kingdalien
Words: 397
Pages: 2

We develop a new methodology to estimate herd behavior in financial markets. We build a model of informational herding that can be estimated with financial transaction data. In the model, rational herding arises because of information-event uncertainty. We estimate the model using data on a NYSE stock (Ashland Inc.) during 1995. Herding occurs often and is particularly pervasive on some days. On average, the proportion of herd buyers is 2 percent; that of herd sellers is 4 percent. Herding also causes important informational inefficiencies in the market, amounting, on average, to 4 percent of the asset's expected value.

This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivity for the Huguenot migration to Prussia. In 1685, religiously persecuted French Huguenots settled in Brandenburg- Prussia and compensated for population losses due to plagues during the Thirty Years' War. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from 1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in a unique database to analyze the effects of skilled immigration to places with underused economic potential. Exploiting this settlement pattern in an instrumental-variable approach, we find substantial long-term effects of Huguenot settlement on the productivity of textile manufactories.

We develop a model in which connections between individuals serve as social collateral to enforce informal insurance payments. We show that: (i) The degree of insurance is governed by the expansiveness of the network, measured with the per capita number of connections that groups have with the rest of the community. "Two-dimensional" networks—like real-world networks in Peruvian villages—are