Psychological Traits and Trading Strategies

This paper analyzes experimentally if psychological traits and cognitive biases affect trading behaviour and performance. Based on the answers of 67 subjects to a psychological questionnaire we measured their degree of overconfidence, impulsiveness and self-monitoring, and their availability, representativeness and confirmation biases. The 67 subjects also participated in an experimental financial market, in the spirit of Plott and Sunder (1988). We find that impulsive subjects tend to place more orders but do not incur larger losses. We also find that overconfident subjects and subjects prone to the confirmation and representativeness biases have a greater tendency to place unprofitable orders. This negative impact of cognitive biases on trading performance is sronger when subjects have acquired some experience of the game. This suggests that biased subjects engage in improper learning.

Mesoscopic Anderson Box: Connecting Weak to Strong Coupling

Both the weakly coupled and strong coupling Anderson impurity problems are characterized by a Fermi-liquid theory with weakly interacting quasiparticles. In an Anderson box, mesoscopic fluctuations of the effective single particle properties will be large. We study how the statistical fluctuations at low temperature in these two problems are connected, using random matrix theory and the slave boson mean field approximation (SBMFA). First, for a resonant level model such as results from the SBMFA, we find the joint distribution of energy levels with and without the resonant level present. Second, if only energy levels within the Kondo resonance are considered, the distributions of perturbed levels collapse to universal forms for both orthogonal and unitary ensembles for all values of the coupling. These universal curves are described well by a simple Wigner-surmise type toy model. Third, we study the fluctuations of the mean field parameters in the SBMFA, finding that they are small. Finally, the change in the intensity of an eigenfunction at an arbitrary point is studied, such as is relevant in conductance measurements: we find that the introduction of the strongly-coupled impurity considerably changes the wave function but that a substantial correlation remains.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Réponse au comment de Hal intitulé " Commentaire de " Transformation thermodynamics : cloaking and concentrating heat flux ", hal-00741585, version 1 - 14 octobre 2012 "

Reply to comment on " Transformation thermodynamics : cloaking and concentrating heat flux ", hal-00741585, version 1 - 14 octobre 2012

Understanding Wage Floor Setting in Industry-Level Agreements: Evidence from France

This paper examines empirically how industry-level wage floors are set in French industry-level wage agreements and how the national minimum wage (NMW) interacts with industry-level wage bargaining. For this, we use a unique dataset containing about 50,000 occupation-specific wage floors in 365 French industries over the period 2007-2015. We find that the NMW has a significant impact on the seasonality and on the timing of the wage bargaining process. Inflation, past sectoral wage increases and real NMW increases are the main drivers of wage floor adjustments; elasticities of wage floors with respect to these macro variables are 0.6, 0.4 and 0.2 respectively. Wage floor elasticities to inflation and to the NMW both decrease along the wage floor distribution but are still positive for all levels of wage floors