A preferred-habitat model of the term structure of interest rates

We model the term structure of interest rates as resulting from the interaction between investor clienteles with preferences for specific maturities and risk-averse arbitrageurs. Because arbitrageurs are risk averse, shocks to clienteles’ demand for bonds affect the term structure— and constitute an additional determinant of bond prices to current and expected future short rates. At the same time, because arbitrageurs render the term structure arbitrage-free, demand effects satisfy no-arbitrage restrictions and can be quite different from the underlying shocks. We show that the preferred-habitat view of the term structure generates a rich set of implications for bond risk premia, the effects of demand shocks and of shocks to short-rate expectations, the economic role of carry trades, and the transmission of monetary policy

Equilibrium interest rate and liquidity premium with transaction costs.

In this paper we study the effects of transaction costs on asset prices. We assume an overlapping generations economy with two riskless assets. The first asset is liquid while the second asset carries proportional transaction costs. We show that agents buy the liquid asset for short-term investment and the illiquid asset for long-term investment. When transaction costs increase, the price of the liquid asset increases. The price of the illiquid asset decreases if the asset is in small supply, but may increase if the supply is large. These results have implications for the effects of transaction taxes and commission deregulation.

A Search-Based Theory of the On-the-Run Phenomenon

Treasury Market, Liquidity, Search

The protection of religious education as a human right: a critical approach to Greek, UK and ECHR law

In an increasingly multicultural Europe, Greece and more intensively Great Britain are faced with the need for protection of religious freedom of individuals or social groups. The question becomes more precise but also acute if it is approached with regard to the right to manifest own religious beliefs in the frame of RE as primary instrument of educational policy, but also in the frame of collective worship. This study is focused on the legislation and the administrative practice concerning primary and secondary schools. It covers both the national and international law provisions permeating the Greek and the British legal order. Leading case law of the Greek Council of State has recently confirmed the obligatory character of attending RE at primary and secondary schools. However, protection is also guaranteed by case law to the parental right to declare in writing before the school authorities that due to conscientious reasons a pupil should be exempted from the duty to attend RE and/or collective worship. Notwithstanding the above a survey of school practice today has shown that only a very limited percentage of parents or guardians have made use of this right. Individual application according to art. 25 ECHR offers additional legal security to Greek citizens in case of a human right infringement. In Britain the ERA 1988 provides for the protection of religious freedom concerning RE, while granting the parents the right of withdrawal of their children from RE and collective worship. Beyond any questions of legislative background it remains always a matter of government policy to support effective protection of the right to RE in favour of minorities. ECHR and case law concerning art. 2 of the First Protocol offer a safe legal basis for ultimate correction of possible unfair judicial handling on national level concerning the right to religious freedom

Persuasion bias, social influence, and uni-dimensional opinions.

We propose a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals are subject to persuasion bias; that is, they fail to account for possible repetition in the information they receive. We show that persuasion bias implies the phenomenon of social influence, whereby one’s influence on group opinions depends not only on accuracy, but also on how well-connected one is in the social network that determines communication. Persuasion bias also implies the phenomenon of unidimensional opinions; that is, individuals’ opinions over a multidimensional set of issues converge to a single “left-right” spectrum. We explore the implications of our model in several natural settings, including political science and marketing, and we obtain a number of novel empirical implications.

A Model of Persuasion - With Implications for Financial Markets

We propose a model of the phenomenon of persuasion. We argue that individual beliefs evolve in a way that overweights the opinions and information of individuals whom they "listen to" relative to other individuals. Such agents can be understood to be acting as though they believe they listen to a representative sample of the individuals with valuable information, even though they may not. We analyze dynamics and convergence of beliefs, characterizing when agents' beliefs converge over time to the same beliefs, and when they instead diverge. Convergent beliefs can be characterized as the weighted average of agents' initial beliefs, and these weights can be interpreted as a measure of ``influence.'' We then explore implications in an asset trading setting. Here we demonstrate that agents profit from being influential as well as being accurate. When agents' choice of whom to listen to is endogenous, we show that an individual's influence can be persistent, even though the individual may be inaccurate.

Curse of the benchmarks

Obsession with short-term performance against market cap benchmarks preordains the dysfunctionality of asset markets. The problems start when trustees hire fund managers to outperform benchmark indexes subject to limits on annual divergence. For multi-asset portfolios the benchmark is generally the performance of peer group funds, also based on market cap. In the absence of formal instructions, asset managers, as well as off-the-peg mutual funds, are still keen to demonstrate their ability against the competition in the short run. If securities markets were efficiently priced in the sense of reflecting best estimates of fundamental value, there would be no problem in using market cap benchmarks. But the terms under which most professional investment is handled ensure that markets are not efficient. Benchmarking causes, first, the inversion of the relationship between risk and return so that high volatile securities and asset classes offer lower returns than low volatile ones. Second, it fosters the pursuit of momentum strategies which then earn profits at the expense of benchmarked funds. The paper explains how these problems arise using rational models of asset mispricing and proposes an incentive-based solution

Asset management as creator of market inefficiency

In this paper, we describe how agency frictions in asset management can generate prime violations of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, such as momentum, value and an inverted risk-return relationship. Momentum in our theory is associated with procyclical fund flows and price over-reaction, and is more pronounced for overvalued assets. The investors who generate the momentum and who are losing from it are those requiring their asset managers to keep their portfolios close to benchmark indices. Our theory suggests a rethinking of asset management contracts. Contracts should employ measures of long-run risk and return, and benchmark indices that emphasize asset fundamentals. There should also be greater transparency on managers’ choice of strategies