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The article develops a dynamic model that nests the rational expectations (RE) and differences of opinion (DO) approaches to study how investors use prices to update their valuations. When investors condition on prices (RE), investor disagreement is related positively to expected returns, return volatility, and market beta, but negatively to return autocorrelation. When investors do not use prices (DO), these relations are reversed. Tests of these predictions on the cross-section of stocks using analyst forecast dispersion and volume as proxies for disagreement provide empirical evidence that is consistent with investors using prices on average.

In this paper I offer a fairly complete account of the idea of social discount rates as applied to public policy analysis. I show that those rates are neither ethical primitives nor observables as market rates of return on investment, but that they ought instead to be derived from economic forecasts and society's conception of distributive justice concerning the allocation of goods and services across personal identities, time, and events. However, I also show that if future uncertainties are large, the formulation of intergenerational well-being we economists have grown used to could lead to ethical paradoxes even if the uncertainties are thin-tailed. Various modelling avenues that offer a way out of the dilemma are discussed. None is entirely satisfactory.

There are many heritage residential neighborhoods in Baghdad some of them belong more than thousand years because this city is taken the important cultural and social place for hundreds years. In last decades, the issue of preserving, rehabilitating and investing heritage residential neighborhoods has received increasing attention at all political, cultural and academic studies. The biggest problem that prevent the developing design in these places are the historical privacy, the weakness in the structures, the high cost because the rehabilitation and maintenance require the high and special skills experiences. Because of the historical and cultural value and what it represents a wealth of all humanity, the studies and researches that studied these subjects avoided the wading in make bold decisions to get the new design of these places , but limited their interest to the study of job investment in those neighborhoods in particular. In addition to, the role of maintenance and rehabilitation operations in supporting this investment, and from the reality of the shortcomings in the study of economic investment policies in dealing with these neighborhoods and the mechanism of protecting them. The importance comes of studying the maintenance and investment policies of these neighborhoods.

We provide evidence for the importance of information asymmetry in asset pricing by using three natural experiments. Consistent with rational expectations models with multiple assets and multiple signals, we find that prices and uninformed demand fall as asymmetry increases. These falls are larger when more investors are uninformed, turnover is larger and more variable, payoffs are more uncertain, and the lost signal is more precise. Prices fall partly because expected returns become more sensitive to liquidity risk. Our results confirm that information asymmetry is priced and imply that a primary channel that links asymmetry to prices is liquidity.

Sacrifice is widely believed to enhance cooperation in churches, communes, gangs, clans, military units, and many other groups. We find that sacrifice can also work in the lab, apart from special ideologies, identities, or interactions. Our subjects play a modified VCM game—one in which they can voluntarily join groups that provide reduced rates of return on private investment. This leads to both endogenous sorting (because free-riders tend to reject the reduced-rate option) and substitution (because reduced private productivity favours increased club involvement). Seemingly unproductive costs thus serve to screen out free-riders, attract conditional cooperators, boost club production, and increase member welfare. The sacrifice mechanism is simple and particularly useful where monitoring difficulties impede punishment, exclusion, fees, and other more standard solutions.

This paper proposes a portfolio choice model in which investors are subject to liquidation risk and (endogenously) face higher costs in the event of joint liquidation (as was observed during the crisis of 2008 to 2009). The risk of joint liquidation creates an incentive for investors to choose heterogeneous portfolios and to rationally forgo diversification benefits. Joint liquidation risk is also reflected in asset prices, resulting in (1) assets with high idiosyneratic risk having low expected returns, and (2) assets that display high correlation with the portfolios of (liquidation-prone) investors having high expected returns.

Despite extensive disclosure requirements, mutual fund investors do not observe all actions of fund managers. We estimate the impact of unobserved actions on fund returns using the return gap--the difference between the reported fund return and the return on a portfolio that invests in the previously disclosed fund holdings. We document that unobserved actions of some funds persistently create value, while such actions of other funds destroy value. Our main result shows that the return gap predicts fund performance.

Despite increasing anecdotal evidence that information technology (IT) assets contribute to firm performance and future growth potential of firms, the empirical results relating IT investments to firm performance measures have been equivocal. However, the bulk of the studies have relied exclusively on accounting-based measures of firm performance, which largely tend to ignore IT's contribution to performance dimensions such as strategic flexibility and intangible value. In this paper, we use Tobin's q , a financial market-based measure of firm performance and examine the association between IT investments and firm q values, after controlling for a variety of industry factors and firm-specific variables. The results based on data from 1988–1993 indicate that, in all of the five years, the inclusion of the IT expenditure variable in the model increased the variance explained in q significantly. The results also showed that, for all five years, IT investments had a significantly positive association with Tobin's q value. Our results are consistent with the notion that IT contributes to a firm's future performance potential, which a forward-looking measure such as the q is better able to capture.

This article analyzes the relationship between the risk-adjusted performance of hedge funds and their proximity to investments using data on Asia-focused hedge funds. I find, relative to an augmented Fung and Hsieh (2004) factor model, that hedge funds with a physical presence (head or research office) in their investment region outperform other hedge funds by 3.72% per year. The local information advantage is pervasive across all major geographical regions, but is strongest for emerging market funds and funds holding illiquid securities. These results are robust to adjustments for fund fees, serial correlation, backfill bias, and incubation bias. I show also that distant funds, especially those based in the United States and the United Kingdom, are able to raise more capital, charge higher fees, and set longer redemption periods, despite their underperformance relative to nearby funds. It appears that distant funds trade investment performance for better access to capital.