More from these Authors

• Working Paper | 2019

  Reflexivity in Credit Markets

  Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson and Lawrence J. Jin

  Reflexivity is the idea that investors' biased beliefs affect market outcomes, and that market outcomes in turn affect investors' beliefs. We develop a behavioral model of the credit cycle featuring such a two-way feedback loop. In our model, investors form beliefs about firms' creditworthiness, in part by extrapolating past default rates. Investor beliefs influence firms' actual creditworthiness because firms that can refinance maturing debt on favorable terms are less likely to default in the short run—even if fundamentals do not justify investors' generosity. Our model is able to match many features of credit booms and busts, including the imperfect synchronization of credit cycles with the real economy, the negative relationship between past credit growth and the future return on risky bonds, and "calm before the storm" periods in which firm fundamentals have deteriorated but the credit market has not yet turned.

  Keywords: reflexivity; Attitudes; Financial Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment; Credit;

  Citation:

  Greenwood, Robin, Samuel G. Hanson, and Lawrence J. Jin. "Reflexivity in Credit Markets." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 25747, April 2019.  View Details

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• Article | American Economic Review | March 2019

  Beliefs about Gender

  Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

  We conduct laboratory experiments that explore how gender stereotypes shape beliefs about ability of oneself and others in different categories of knowledge. The data reveal two patterns. First, men’s and women’s beliefs about both oneself and others exceed observed ability on average, particularly in difficult tasks. Second, overestimation of ability by both men and women varies across categories. To understand these patterns, we develop a model that separates gender stereotypes from misestimation of ability related to the difficulty of the task. We find that stereotypes contribute to gender gaps in self-confidence, assessments of others, and behavior in a cooperative game.

  Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Perspective; Prejudice and Bias; Gender;

  Citation:

  Bordalo, Pedro, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer. "Beliefs about Gender." American Economic Review 109, no. 3 (March 2019): 739–773.  View Details

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• Working Paper | 2019

  Memory and Representativeness

  Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Andrei Shleifer

  We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i) decreasing the frequency of a given color in one group significantly increases the recalled frequency of that color in the other group and ii) for a fixed set of images, different cues for the same objective distribution entail different interference patterns and different probabilistic assessments. Selective retrieval and interference may offer a foundation for the representativeness heuristic, but more generally for understanding the formation of probability judgments from experienced statistical associations.

  Keywords: Judgments; Cognition and Thinking;

  Citation:

  Bordalo, Pedro, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter, and Andrei Shleifer. "Memory and Representativeness." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 25692, March 2019.  View Details

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