statistical equilibrium wealth distributions in an exchange economy with stochastic preferences abstract we describe an exchange market consisting of many agents with stochastic preferences for two goods when individuals are indifferent between goods statistical mechanics predicts that goods and wealth will have steady state gamma distributions simulation studies show that gamma distributions arise for a broader class of preference distributions we demonstrate this mathematically in the limit of large numbers of individual agents these studies illustrate the potential power of a statistical mechanical approach to stochastic models in economics and suggest that gamma distributions will describe steady state wealths for a class of stochastic models with periodic redistribution of conserved quantities journal of economic literature classification numbers c15 c62 c73 d3 d5

bulls bears and market sheep abstract a deterministic excess demand model of stock market behavior is presented that generates stochastically fluctuating prices and randomly switching bear and bull markets

the effectiveness of keynes tobin transaction taxes when heterogeneous agents can trade in different markets a behavioral finance approach abstract we develop a model in which boundedly rational agents apply technical and fundamental analysis to identify trading signals in two different speculative markets whether an agent trades and if so in which market with which strategy depends on profit considerations as it turns out an ongoing evolutionary competition between the trading strategies causes complex price dynamics which closely resembles the behavior of actual speculative prices moreover we find that if the agents have to pay a transaction tax in one market price variability decreases in this market but increases in the other market however the imposition of a uniform tax on all transactions stabilizes both markets our results suggest that if regulators of a market introduce a transaction tax other markets are likely to follow

s p 500 cash stock price volatilities s p 500 stock return volatilities are compared to the volatilities of a matched set of stocks after controlling for cross sectional differences in firm attributes known to affect volatility no significant difference in volatility is observed between 1975 and 1983before the start of trade in index futures and index options since then s p 500 stocks have been relatively more volatile the difference is statistically but not economically significant the relative increase occurs primarily in daily returns and only to a lesser extent in longer interval returns other factors besides the start of derivative trade could be responsible for the small increase in volatility stock price volatility has received much attention in the popular press over the last few years especially since the october 19 1987 stock market crash the rise in volatility has alarmed investors regulators and the public in general some suggest that the start of trade in stock index futures and index options increased speculative activity that in turn destabilized cash markets causing higher volatility large trading activity in the derivative contracts makes the suggestion plausible volume in index futures and index options increased dramatically since their introductions in 1982 and 1983 by 1987 the average daily dollar volume in the s p 500 futures contracts alone exceeded the dollar volume of cash s p 500 trade by a factor of about two while the dollar value of the daily net change in total open interest is about 8 of s p 500 stock dollar volume speculative trade in futures and options frequently is accused of destabilizing underlying cash markets the charge has been made for more than a century in the agricultural precious metal and currency markets recent evidence by french and roll 1986 showing stock variance to be strongly related to trading session hours heightens these concerns unfortunately theoretical analyses of whether speculative trade destabilizes cash markets lead to conflicting conclusions depending on what assumptions are made 1 school of business administration university of southern california and office of economic analysis u s securities and exchange commission i wish to thank mary denny mcsweeny and steve hornstein for their valuable research assistance and the referee and editor for their many suggestions and insights the opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the u s securities and exchange commission or those of the author s colleagues on its staff an increase in well informed speculative trade has two opposite effects on measured volatility it decreases volatility due to order flow imbalances caused by uninformed traders because informed traders provide liquidity in such events and it increases volatility due to new fundamental information since the information which is assumed to be generated at discrete time intervals is impounded into

the impact of firm specific news on implied volatilities we study the implied volatility behavior of call options around scheduled news announcement days implied volatilities increase significantly during the pre event period and reach a maximum on the eve of the news announcement after the news release implied volatility drops sharply and gradually moves back to its long run level only on the event date are movements in the price of the underlying significantly larger than expected these results confirm the theoretical results of merton 1973

profitability of time series momentum abstract we propose a continuous time heterogeneous agent model consisting of fundamental momentum and contrarian traders to explain the significant time series momentum we show that the performance of momentum strategy is determined by both time horizon and the market dominance of momentum traders specifically when momentum traders are more active in the market momentum strategies with short long time horizons stabilize destabilize the market and meanwhile the market under reacts over reacts in short run long run this provides profit opportunity for time series momentum strategies with short horizons and reversal with long horizons when momentum traders are less active in the market they always lose the results provide an insight into the profitability of time series momentum documented in recent empirical studies

a pseudo criterion for security betas in the finnish stock market because of nonsynchronous trading the traditional estimates for systematic risk are biased especially in small security markets a pseudo criterion is applied to evaluate ten different systematic risk estimates beta coefficients in the thin finnish stock market

market response to banks granting lines of credit abstract prior research has shown and this paper confirms that when the market becomes aware a line of credit is granted the borrower s stock has a positive and significant reaction the borrower s reaction is used to identify the exact date the market becomes aware of the granting of the line of credit this date is used as a one day window to investigate whether the bank s stock also reacts this reaction will be most obvious with large lines of credit all lines of credit larger than us 1 billion granted during the years 1993 1996 are investigated the results show as predicted a positive and significant reaction by the bank s stock

wealth driven selection in a financial market with heterogeneous agents we study the co evolution of asset prices and individual wealth in a financial market with an arbitrary number of heterogeneous boundedly rational investors using wealth dynamics as a selection device we are able to characterize the long run market outcomes i e asset returns and wealth distributions for a general class of competing investment behaviors our investigation illustrates that market interaction and wealth dynamics pose certain limits on the outcome of agents interactions even within the wilderness of bounded rationality as an application we consider the case of heterogeneous mean variance optimizers and provide insights into the results of the simulation model introduced by levy levy and solomon 1994

heterogeneous beliefs and adaptive behaviour in a continuous time asset price model abstract this paper extends the analysis of the seminal work of brock and hommes 1997 brock and hommes 1998 on heterogeneous beliefs and rational routes to randomness in discrete time models to a continuous time model of asset pricing the resulting model characterised mathematically by a system of stochastic delay differential equations provides a unified approach to deal with adaptive behaviour of heterogeneous agents and market stability impact of lagged price used by chartists to form their expectations for the underlying deterministic model we show not only that the result of brock and hommes on rational routes to market instability in discrete time holds in continuous time but also a double edged effect of an increase in lagged price used by the chartists on market stability for the stochastic model we demonstrate that the interaction and boundedly rational behaviour of heterogeneous agents can generate various market phenomena such as bubbles and crashes and replicate stylised facts including volatility clustering and long range dependence in volatility

a dynamic analysis of moving average rules abstract the use of various moving average ma rules remains popular with financial market practitioners these rules have recently become the focus of a number empirical studies but there have been very few studies of financial market models where some agents employ technical trading rules of the type used in practice in this paper we propose a dynamic financial market model in which demand for traded assets has both a fundamentalist and a chartist component the chartist demand is governed by the difference between current price and a long run ma both types of traders are boundedly rational in the sense that based on a fitness measure such as realized capital gains traders switch from a strategy with low fitness to the one with high fitness we characterize the stability and bifurcation properties of the underlying deterministic model via the reaction coefficient of the fundamentalists the extrapolation rate of the chartists and the lag length used for the ma by increasing the intensity of choice to switching strategies we then examine various rational routes to randomness for different ma rules the price dynamics of the ma rule are also examined and one of our main findings is that an increase of the window length of the ma rule can destabilize an otherwise stable system leading to more complicated even chaotic behaviour the analysis of the corresponding stochastic model is able to explain various market price phenomena including temporary bubbles sudden market crashes price resistance and price switching between different levels

heterogeneous expectations boom bust housing cycles and supply conditions a nonlinear economic dynamics approach abstract we combine a standard stock flow housing market model incorporating explicit relationships between house prices the housing stock and the rent level with a parsimonious expectation formation scheme of housing market investors reflecting an evolving mix of extrapolative and regressive expectation rules the model results in a two dimensional discrete time nonlinear dynamical system based on realistic parameters the model is able to generate endogenous boom bust housing market dynamics with lasting periods of overvaluation and overbuilding we thus exploit our model to investigate how real forces in particular supply conditions interact with expectations driven housing market fluctuations

bubbles crashes and endogenous expectations in experimental spot asset markets1 spot asset trading is studied in an environment in which all investors receive the same dividend from a known probability distribution at the end of each of t 15 or 30 trading periods fourteen of twenty two experiments exhibit price bubbles followed by crashes relative to intrinsic dividend value when traders are experienced this reduces but does not eliminate the probability of a bubble the regression of changes in mean price on lagged excess bids number of bids minus the number of offers in the previous period p pt a f b 1 o l supports the hypothesis that a e d the one period expected value of the dividend and that f 0 where excess bids is a surrogate measure of excess demand arising from homegrown capital gains losses expectations thus when bt 1 o goes to zero we have convergence to rational expectations in the sense of fama 1970 that arbitrage becomes unprofitable the observed bubble phenomenon can also be interpreted as a form of temporary myopia tirole 1982 from which agents learn that capital gains expectations are only temporarily sustainable ultimately inducing common expectations or priors tirole 1982 four of twenty six experiments all using experienced subjects yield outcomes that appear to the chart s eye to converge early to rational expectations although even in these cases we get 0 and small price fluctuations of a few cents that invite scalping

house prices bank instability and economic growth evidence from the threshold model abstract this paper examines the effects of house prices on bank instability when gauged at various levels of income growth bank stability may respond differently to house price changes or deviations from fundamental values in an economic boom environment than in a bust circumstance a threshold estimation technique developed by hansen 1999 is applied to a panel of 286 u s metropolitan statistical areas msas over the period 1990q1 2010q4 we consider two house price indicators the house price changes and the house price deviations from long run equilibrium the results suggest the existence of income growth threshold effects in the relationship between house prices and bank instability specifically there are two income growth thresholds when using the house price changes and one income growth threshold when the house price deviations are applied robustness results using the non msas sample from 1995q1 to 2010q4 provide further evidence of income growth threshold effects

a contribution to event study methodology with an application to the dutch stock market abstract this paper proposes an extended market model for event studies based on daily stock returns for actual data the assumptions of the simple market model are violated the return distribution is not normal and neither the variance of the error term nor the risk parameter beta are constant our model incorporates the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch model with t distributed errors and a time dependent beta we test for anomalies by adding dummy variables in the regression equation our model is fairly general and could be used in a wide variety of event study situations we illustrate the model by an analysis of the weekend and the option expiration effect we use return data from the dutch stock market the weekend effect on stock returns is significant but no expiration effect could be detected

conditional heteroscedasticity in time series of stock returns evidence and forecasts this article presents new evidence about the time series behavior of stock prices daily return series exhibit significant levels of second order dependence and they cannot be modeled as linear white noise processes a reasonable return generating process is empirically shown to be a first order autoregressive process with conditionally heteroskedastic innovations in particular generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic garch 1 1 processes fit to data very satisfactorily various out of sample forecasts of monthly return variances are generated and compared statistically forecasts based on the garch model are found to be superior copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

financial crises and regime dependent dynamics abstract generalized with the regime dependent beliefs and regime switching dynamics the simple market maker framework established by day and huang 1990 is capable to model all types of crises that is sudden crisis disturbing crisis and smooth crisis and to offer economic and dynamic justifications on how and why these crises appear moreover the model simulations verify the salient qualitative and statistical properties commonly observed in the real financial data such as fat tails volatility clustering long range dependence leverage effect and other stylized facts additionally the model replicates the various chart patterns widely applied in the technical analysis

an evaluation of volatility forecasting techniques the existing literature contains conflicting evidence regarding the relative quality of stock market volatility forecasts evidence can be found supporting the superiority of relatively complex models including arch class models while there is also evidence supporting the superiority of more simple alternatives these inconsistencies are of particular concern because of the use of and reliance on volatility forecasts in key economic decision making and analysis and in asset option pricing this paper employs daily australian data to examine this issue the results suggest that the arch class of models and a simple regression model provide superior forecasts of volatility however the various model rankings are shown to be sensitive to the error statistic used to assess the accuracy of the forecasts nevertheless a clear message is that volatility forecasting is a notoriously difficult task

volatility clustering a nonlinear theoretical approach abstract this paper verifies the endogenous mechanism and economic intuition on volatility clustering using the coexistence of two locally stable attractors proposed by gaunersdorfer et al 2008 by considering a simple asset pricing model with two types of boundedly rational traders fundamentalists and trend followers and noise traders we provide theoretical conditions on the coexistence of a locally stable steady state and a locally stable invariant circle of the underlying nonlinear deterministic financial market model and show numerically that the interaction of the coexistence of the deterministic dynamics and noise processes can endogenously generate volatility clustering and long range dependence in volatility observed in financial markets economically volatility clustering occurs when neither the fundamental nor trend following traders dominate the market and when traders switch more often between the two strategies

stability chaos and multiple attractors a single agent makes a difference abstract this paper provides an example in which a slight behavioral heterogeneity may fundamentally change the dynamical properties of a nonlinear cobweb market with a quadratic cost function and an isoelastic demand function we consider two types of producers cautious adapters and naive optimizers in a market of naive optimizers a single cautious adapter stabilizes the otherwise exploding market in a market of cautious adapters a single naive optimizer may destabilize the market without him there exists at most one periodic attractor in the market but with him there may appear many and even infinitely many coexisting periodic attractors

an examination of the robustness of the weekend effect this paper analyzes the robustness of the day of the week dow and weekend effects to alternative estimation and testing procedures the results show that sample size can distort the interpretation of classical test statistics unless the significance level is adjusted down ward specification tests reveal widespread departures from ols assumptions hypothe sis tests results are reported using robust econometric methods and a garch model the strength of the dow and weekend effect evidence appears to depend on the estimation and testing method both effects seem to have disappeared by 1975

an empirical investigation of the possibility of stochastic systematic risk in the market model in most empirical work on the market model the parameters of that model are estimated by ordinary least squares effectively assuming that the systematic risk of an asset or portfolio is constant through time however a plausible alternative hypothesis would allow the systematic risk of the stock of a company to vary through time such variation may arise through the influence of either microeconomic factors such as operational changes in the company or changes in the business environment peculiar to the company or macroeconomic factors such as the rate of inflation general business conditions and expectations about relevant future events a detailed discussion of these points is provided by rosenberg and guy 1976a 1976b support for the hypothesis that systematic risk varies through time is provided in the studies by jacob 1971 blume 1975 and fabozzi and francis 1978 in this paper we allow the possibility that systematic risk of an asset is stochastic in principle an attempt to model this stochastic behavior could be made through allowing systematic risk to follow a member of the general arima class of models of box and jenkins 1970 ideally the available data would be employed to suggest a specific model from this general class however this approach has to face very serious we discuss the market model in which the possibility is allowed that beta is stochastic and obeys a first order autoregressive process following a brief discussion of methodological issues in the estimation and testing of such models results are reported on an empirical study of a large sample of monthly returns of common stock we find strong evidence indicating stochastic systematic risk but relatively little evidence against the random coefficient model

nonlinear dynamics and stock returns simple deterministic systems are capable of generating chaotic output that mimics the output of stochastic systems for this reason algorithms have been developed to distinguish between these two alternatives these algorithms and related statistical tests are also useful in detecting the presence of nonlinear dependence in time series in this article the authors apply these procedures to stock returns and find evidence that indicates the presence of nonlinear dependence on weekly returns from the center for research in security prices value weighted index copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

exchange rate expectations of chartists and fundamentalists this paper provides novel evidence on exchange rate expectations of both chartists and fundamentalists separately these groups indeed form expectations differently chartists change their expectations more often however all professionals expectations vary considerably as they generally follow strong exchange rate trends in line with non linear exchange rate modeling professionals expect mean reversion only if exchange rates deviate much from ppp chartists survive in fx markets as they forecast equally accurately as fundamentalists unexpected from an effcient market viewpoint chartists even outperform fundamentalists at short horizons overall these findings clearly support the chartist fundamentalist approach

disequilibrium economic dynamics a post schumpeterian contribution abstract adaptive economizing in a decentralized economy with alternative technologies and scarce resources leads to various kinds of locally unstable behavior economic disequilibrium is the rule in such a world and requires the presence of market mechanisms that make possible continued viability if in addition to local instability economies are also globally unstable as considerable evidence suggests then the discovery and application of new structure is essential a complete dynamic theory of economic change must therefore be based not only on conventional rationality and routinely adapting behavior but on a superior faculty which may perhaps best be called creative intelligence

the price effect of option introduction this paper examines the price effect of option introduction from 1974 to 1980 the introduction of individual options causes a permanent price increase in the underlying security beginning approximately three days before introduction the price effect appears to be associated with introduction and not announcement throughout the sample period excess returns volatility declines with option introduction systematic risk is unchanged there is a positive relation between the price increase and a measure of activity in the options market copyright 1989 by american finance association

volatility persistence and stock valuations some empirical evidence using garch summary in this paper issues of volatility persistence and the changing risk premium in the stock market are investigated using the garch estimation technique we get a point estimate of the index of relative risk aversion of 4 5 and confirm the existence of changing equity premiums in the us during 1962 1985 the persistence of shocks to the stock return volatility is so high that the data cannot reject a non stationary volatility process specification the results of this paper are consistent with malkiel and pindyck s hypothesis that it is the unforseen rise ini the investment uncertainty during 1974 that causes the market to plunge

testing the martingale hypothesis in deutsche mark futures with models specifying the form of heteroscedasticity summary we examine the form of heteroscedasticity in deutsche mark futures price data and compare different specifications of the particular way that the variance is changing over time the martingale hypothesis is tested with daily and weekly rates of change of futures prices for the deutsche mark and some evidence is found against this hypothesis in analyses of daily data from 1981 to 1985 this rejection of the martingale hypothesis may be attributed to trading day effects in foreign currency prices and the resulting day of the week patterns in futures prices when the martingale hypothesis is tested with weekly data the null hypothesis is retained

green expectations current effects of anticipated carbon pricing i report evidence that an anticipated strengthening of environmental policy increased emissions i find that the breakdown of the u s senate s 2010 climate effort generated positive excess returns

speculative behaviour and complex asset price dynamics a global analysis this paper analyses the dynamics of a model of a share market consisting of two groups of traders fundamentalists who base their trading decisions on the expectation of a return to the fundamental value of the asset and chartists who base their trading decisions on an analysis of past price trends the model is reduced to a two dimensional map whose global dynamic behaviour is analysed in detail the dynamics are affected by parameters measuring the strength of fundamentalist demand and the speed with which chartists adjust their estimate of the trend to past price changes the parameter space is characterized according to the local stability instability of the equilibrium point as well as the non invertibility of the map the method of critical curves of non invertible maps is used to understand and describe the range of global bifurcations that can occur it is also shown how the knowledge of deterministic dynamics uncovered here can aid in understanding the behaviour of stochastic versions of the model

a note on optimal estimation from a risk management perspective under possibly misspecified tail behavior many financial time series show leptokurtic behavior that is fat tails such tail behavior is important for risk management in this article i focus on the calculation of value at risk var as a downside risk measure for optimal asset portfolios using a framework centered on the student t distribution i explicitly allow for a discrepancy between the fat tailedness of the true distribution of asset returns and that of the distribution used by the investment manager as a result numbers for the overestimation or underestimation of the true var of a given portfolio can be computed these numbers are used to rank several well known estimation methods for determining the unknown parameters of the distribution of asset returns minimizing the absolute percentage mismatch between the nominal and actual or true var leads to the choice of a gaussian maximum quasilikelihood estimator that is a least squares type of estimator the maximum likelihood estimator has less satisfactory behavior outlier robust es

can a stochastic cusp catastrophe model explain stock market crashes this paper is the first attempt to fit a stochastic cusp catastrophe model to stock market data we show that the cusp catastrophe model explains the crash of stock exchanges much better than other models using the data of u s stock markets we demonstrate that the crash of october 19 1987 may be better explained by cusp catastrophe theory which is not true for the crash of september 11 2001 with the help of sentiment measures such as the index put call options ratio and trading volume the former models the chartists the latter the fundamentalists we have found that the 1987 returns are bimodal and the cusp catastrophe model fits these data better than alternative models therefore we may say that the crash has been led by internal forces however the causes for the crash of 2001 are external which is also evident in much weaker presence of bifurcations in the data in this case alternative models explain the crash of stock exchanges better than the cusp catastrophe model

dynamic analysis of policy lag in a keynes goodwin model stability instability cycles and chaos abstract in this paper we investigate the impact of government s stabilization policy on the dynamic behavior of the economic system in an analytical framework of a keynes goodwin model of the growth cycle in particular we study the effects of the policy lag on macroeconomic stability analytically and numerically it is shown that the increase of the policy lag contributes to destabilize the system and cyclical behavior and chaotic motion emerge in some ranges of the parameter values

earnings announcements stock price adjustment and the existence of option markets this paper employs a new approach to study the effects of option trading on the behavior of underlying stock prices extant research compares distributional properties of the stock price at two points in time divided by an event in the option market that might affect price behavior as an alternative we examine the stock price adjustment to the release of quarterly earnings using samples of firms with and without listed options we find the two samples exhibit different adjustment processes with the nonoption firms requiring substantially more time to adjust since the advent of organized stock option trading the investment community

boom bust dynamics in a stock market participation model with heterogeneous traders abstract the boundedly rational heterogeneous agent literature can be considered to have properly started with a number of contributions in the early 90s with the impressive contribution by carl chiarella who amongst his huge field of research developed several milestone models of heterogeneous interacting agents that are able to generate a number of dynamic outcomes compatible with the empirical evidence in this paper we propose a stock market model in which participation depends upon an attractiveness measure related to the market activity and the fundamental value of the market a market maker adjusts the stock price with respect to the current endogenous excess market demand which in turn depends on the demands of the different types of agents populating the economy market participants are also allowed to switch between different strategies analytical and numerical results confirm how the participation mechanism amplifies the occurrence of endogenous booms and busts in line with empirical and experimental evidence

how does germany s green energy policy affect electricity market volatility an application of conditional autoregressive range models abstract based on a dynamic model for the high low range of electricity prices this article analyses the effects of germany s green energy policy on the volatility of the electricity market using european energy exchange data from 2000 to 2015 we find rather high volatility in the years 2000 2009 but also that the weekly price range has significantly declined in the period following the year 2009 this period is characterised by active regulation under the energy industry law enwg the eu emissions trading directive etd and the renewable energy law eeg in contrast to the preceding period price jumps are smaller and less frequent especially for day time hours implying that current policy measures are effective in promoting renewable energies while simultaneously upholding electricity market stability this is because the regulations strive towards a more and more flexible and market oriented structure which allows better integration of renewable energies and supports an efficient alignment of renewable electricity supply with demand

a robust rational route to randomness in a simple asset pricing model abstract we investigate asset pricing dynamics in an adaptive evolutionary asset pricing model with fundamentalists trend followers and a market maker agents can choose between a fundamentalist strategy at positive information cost or choose a trend following strategy for free price adjustment is proportional to the excess demand in the asset market agents asynchronously update their strategy according to realized net profits in the recent past as agents become more sensitive to differences in strategy performance the fundamental steady state becomes unstable and multiple steady states may arise as the traders sensitivity to differences in fitness increases a bifurcation route to chaos sets in due to homoclinic bifurcations of stable and unstable manifolds of the fundamental steady state

commodity price fluctuations price dependent delays and nonlinearities as explanatory factors this paper develops a price adjustment model for a single commodity market with state dependent production and storage delays conditions for the equilibrium price to be stable are derived in terms of a variety of economic parameters when stability of the equilibrium price is lost a hopf bifurcation occurs giving rise to an oscillatory commodity price with a period between two and four times the equilibrium production storage delay

herding trend chasing and market volatility abstract we introduce a heterogeneous agent asset pricing model in continuous time to show that although trend chasing switching and herding all contribute to market volatility in price and return and to volatility clustering their impacts are different the fluctuations of the market price and return and the level of the significant autocorrelations acs of the absolute and squared returns increase with the intensities of herding and trend chasing based on long time horizon however an increase in switching intensity reduces the return volatility and in particular a low switching intensity reduces the price volatility and increases the level of the significant acs but the effect becomes opposite when the switching intensity is high we also show that market noise plays a more important role than fundamental noise on the power law behavior of returns

analysis of the term structure of implied volatilities from various empirical work it is well known that the volatility of asset returns changes over time this might be one of the reasons that implied volatilities differ for options that only differ in time to maturity we construct models for the relation between short and long term implied volatilities based on three different assumptions of stock return volatility behavior i e mean reverting garch and egarch models we test these relations on option price data and conclude that egarch gives the best description of asset prices and the term structure of options implied volatilities

portfolio selection with inflation linked bonds and indexation lags abstract we derive the price of inflation indexed bonds of which the payments are linked to a lagged price index and solve for the optimal bond portfolio under both inflation and indexation lags in closed form we show that indexation lags increase the number of state variables characterizing both the bond prices and the optimal portfolio the lag induced state variables affect the future investment opportunity and hence further arm investors with the tools for hedging inflation risk that is however unhedgeable if there is no indexation lag we find that the optimal portfolio accounts for the indexation lags by also exploring the historical information and increases investors welfare therefore we document a positive effect of the indexation lags that are typically considered as a type of market friction

reviving kalecki s business cycle model in a growth context abstract in 1935 kalecki formulated the first fully specified model of a macroeconomic dynamics in which he studied an endogenous and most elementary business cycle mechanism to revive his insights the present paper adapts his stationary economy to a growth context introducing a reasonable nonlinearity into the investment function it then takes care that the model exhibits persistent cyclical behaviour that is characterized by a unique globally attracting limit cycle this feature is a robust property a calibration of the numerical parameters achieves desired values for the cycle period as well as the amplitudes of the output capital ratio and the capital growth rate it is moreover demonstrated that a one time shock to the dynamics can easily have long lasting effects on the amplitudes despite common misgivings about delay differential equations which here result from kalecki s implementation lag the analysis can be conducted with a limited mathematical effort

delay differential neoclassical growth model abstract this paper develops a continuous time neoclassical growth model with time delay despite of its simple structure the resulting dynamic system shows emergence of erratic fluctuations in the capital accumulation process when the production function is unimodal and the delay in production is explicitly considered it complements the seminal paper of day 1982 in which a discrete time neoclassical growth model displayed chaotic behavior for some configurations of the propensity to save the growth rate of labor and the capital depreciation rate our analysis has at least two implications first nonlinearities and delay matter for a birth of aperiodic fluctuations of national product in the continuous time model second comparing the effects caused by two different time delays fixed and continuously distributed time delays reveals that the continuous time model with the former can generate complex fluctuations while the one with the latter generates simple fluctuations when the shape parameter of the density function is small and complex fluctuations when large

coordinated bubbles and crashes abstract in a market with information friction investors strategically consider the actions of others and evolutionarily switch between fundamental and technical strategies to maximize their payoffs the collective actions of all investors exert feedback on asset price which affects investors subsequent actions we find that investors have the incentive to adopt fundamental strategy to restore market efficiency only if the mispricing is sufficiently large when investors fail to coordinate on the fundamental strategy market inefficiency increases which blows the bubble as market inefficiency grows the coordination on fundamental strategy strengthens which eventually bursts the bubble

effects of tobin taxes in minority game markets we show that the introduction of tobin taxes in agent based models of currency markets can lead to a reduction of speculative trading and reduce the magnitude of exchange rate fluctuations at intermediate tax rates in this regime revenues for the market maker obtained from speculators are maximal we here focus on minority game models of markets which are accessible by exact techniques from statistical mechanics results are supported by computer simulations our findings suggest that at finite systems sizes the effect is most pronounced in a critical region around the phase transition of the infinite system but much weaker if the market is operating far from criticality and does not exhibit anomalous fluctuations

inflation expectations and macroeconomic dynamics the case of rational versus extrapolative expectations the motivation of this paper is to understand the effects of coupling a macroeconomic model of inflation rate dynamics relying on an aggregate expectation to a heterogeneous expectations framework a standard macroeconomic textbook model consisting of okun s law an expectations augmented phillips curve and an aggregate demand relation is extended to allow agents the possibility of selecting between different types of forecasting strategies to predict the future inflation rate rules that have produced low prediction errors in the recent past are favored by agents here we consider trend following and rational expectations using a mixture of analytical and numerical tools we investigate the model s dynamics and discuss the conditions under which the extended model leads to endogenous fluctuations in macroeconomic variables some preliminary results are offered for the case in which a taylor like monetary policy rule is included in the model jel classification c61 c62 e31 e32

heterogeneous expectations and speculative behavior in a dynamic multi asset framework abstract this paper develops a dynamic model of a financial market where heterogeneous agents invest among multiple risky assets and a risk free asset under a market maker scenario particular attention is paid to the case of two risky assets and two agent types fundamentalists and trend chasers whose beliefs on both first and second moments of the conditional distribution of returns are based on past observations conditions for the stability of the fundamental equilibrium are established and the effect of the correlation between the risky assets is examined it turns out that investors anticipated correlation and dynamic portfolio diversification do not always have a stabilizing role but rather may act as a source of complexity in the financial market

speculative behavior and the dynamics of interacting stock markets abstract we develop a simple agent based financial market model in which heterogeneous speculators apply technical and fundamental analysis to trade in two different stock markets speculators strategy market selections are repeated at each time step and depend on predisposition effects herding behavior and market circumstances simulations reveal that our model is able to explain a number of nontrivial statistical properties of and between international stock markets including bubbles and crashes fat tailed return distributions volatility clustering persistent trading volume coevolving stock prices and cross correlated volatilities against this background our model may be deemed to have been validated

conservation and human welfare economic analysis of ecosystem services the importance of the links between well functioning ecosystems and human well being are clearly evident in our age of rapidly changing environmental and socio economic conditions and yet the role ecosystems play in supporting and sustaining human welfare has been only a marginal area of study to date in the field of economics dasgupta 2010 but this is starting to change millennium ecosystem assessment 2005 and the burgeoning literature on ecosystem services that has followed largely instigated by work in ecology has begun to percolate into economics the number of articles by economists on various aspects of ecosystem services including the benefits of conserving ecosystems and biodiversity tradeoffs among services payments for ecosystem services pes and other incentive mechanisms has risen dramatically in the past several years still the economics literature on ecosystems and biodiversity is nowhere near as prominent as the economics literature on climate change economists have played a central role in defining the key elements of the debate on climate change following publication of the stern review stern 2007 and the ensuing debates e g nordhaus 2007 sterner and persson 2008 weitzman 2007 economists have yet to play such a central role in ecosystem services and biodiversity ecosystems provide a wide range of benefits from the water and climate regulation roles of forests the waste assimilation and storm regulation capacities of wetlands to the cultural and aesthetic benefits derived from savannas ecosystems processes and raw materials are

20th anniversary of eaere the european association of environmental and resource economists environmental and resource economics occupies a curious place in contemporary economics i know of no economist who does not regard nature to be a vital capital asset nor do i know any economist who does not regard humanity s dealings with nature to involve inter temporal externalities and yet most economists appear to be convinced that technological advances and the accumulation of reproducible capital and growth in human capital can overcome diminutions in natural capital otherwise it is hard to explain why twentieth century economics has been so detached from the environmental sciences judging by the profession s writings we economists see nature when we see it at all as a backdrop from which resources and services can be drawn in isolation macroeconomic forecasts routinely exclude natural capital and accounting for nature if it comes into the calculus at all is an afterthought to the real business of doing economics when asked economists acknowledge nature s existence but many deny she is worth much at the margin i have heard professional colleagues remark at seminars that the services nature provides amount at best to 2 3 of an economy s output which is the share of agriculture in the gross domestic product of the united states why they ask should one incorporate a capital asset in macro economic models of growth and distribution when it is of negligible importance typically growth models assume that nature is a fixed indestructible factor of production 1 the problem with the assumption is that it is wrong nature consists of degradable resources agricultural land forests watersheds fisheries fresh water sources wetlands the atmosphere more generally ecosystems are assets that are self regenerative but suffer from depletion or deterioration when they are over used 2 the innumerable processes that characterize nature run at different speeds and operate at different spatial scales which give rise to positive feedback loops that unless countered can mean catastrophes for people ranging from village communities to populations covering entire biomes moreover the environmental sciences tell us that the elasticity of substitution between reproducible capital and

macroeconomic and stock market interactions with endogenous aggregate sentiment dynamics abstract this paper studies the implications of heterogeneous capital gain expectations on output and asset prices we consider a disequilibrium macroeconomic model where agents expectations on future capital gains affect aggregate demand agents beliefs take two forms fundamentalist and chartist and the relative weight of the two types of agents is endogenously determined we show that there are two sources of instability arising from the interaction of the financial with the real part of the economy and from the heterogeneous opinion dynamics two main conclusions are derived on the one hand perhaps surprisingly the non linearity embedded in the opinion dynamics far from the steady state can play a stabilizing role by preventing the economy from moving towards an explosive path on the other hand however real financial interactions and sentiment dynamics do amplify exogenous shocks and tend to generate persistent fluctuations and the associated welfare losses we consider alternative policies to mitigate these effects

complex bubble persistence in closed end country funds abstract we seek to resolve the misspecified fundamental problem in speculative bubbles through examining the behavior of closed end country funds which possess well defined fundamentals based on their net asset values we study six funds during an episode when large premia emerged and subsequently disappeared we apply rescaled range and regime switching tests which reject the no bubble null hypothesis for these premia these results are placed in a complex bubble model framework interpretable according to the big player model

examining the effectiveness of price limits in an artificial stock market abstract this paper proposes an agent based framework to examine the effectiveness of price limits in an artificial stock market the market is composed of many boundedly rational and heterogeneous traders whose learning behavior is represented by a genetic programming algorithm we calibrate the model to replicate several stylized facts observed in real financial markets based on this environment the impacts of price limits are analyzed from the perspectives of volatility price distortion volume and welfare we find that the imposition of price limits possesses both positive and negative effects however compared with the market without price limits appropriate price limits help to reduce volatility and price distortion and increase the liquidity and welfare

on the complicated price dynamics of a simple one dimensional discontinuous financial market model with heterogeneous interacting traders abstract we develop a financial market model with heterogeneous interacting agents market makers adjust prices with respect to excess demand chartists believe in the persistence of bull and bear markets and fundamentalists bet on mean reversion moreover speculators trade asymmetrically in over and undervalued markets and while some of them determine the size of their orders via linear trading rules others always trade the same amount of assets the dynamics of our model is driven by a one dimensional discontinuous map despite the simplicity of our model analytical graphical and numerical analysis reveals a surprisingly rich set of interesting dynamical behaviors

exchange rate dynamics central bank interventions and chaos control methods abstract we use a simple chartist fundamentalist model developed by day and huang to explore recent chaos control algorithms as potential candidates for central bank intervention rules we find that methods such as delayed feedback control ogy and constant feedback have in principle the potential to reduce exchange rate variability and deviations from fundamentals even in the presence of large dynamic noise

linkages in international stock markets evidence from a classification procedure in this article we propose a new approach to evaluate the predictable components in stock indices using a boosting based classification technique and we use this method to examine causality among the three main stock market indices in the world during periods of large positive and negative price changes the empirical evidence seems to indicate that the standard poors 500 index contains incremental information that is not present in either the ftse 100 index financial times stock exchange index or the nikkei 225 index and that could be used to enhance the predictability of the large positive and negative returns in the three main stock market indices in the world this in turn would suggest a causality relationship running from the standard poors 500 index to both the ftse 100 and the nikkei 225 indices

an analysis of the cobweb model with boundedly rational heterogeneous producers abstract this paper considers the traditional cobweb model with heterogenous risk averse producers whose supply functions involve their estimates of the conditional mean and variance of the future price the producers seek to learn these quantities by applying geometric decay processes gdp to past prices the heterogeneity manifests itself in the lag lengths and memory parameters applied to past prices as well as in risk aversion coefficients we find that each dimension of heterogeneity changes enriches the cobweb dynamics with respect to the case of homogeneous producers

exhaustibility and risk as asset class dimensions a social investor approach to capital resource economies this paper develops a framework in which asset class dimensions are extended to include both risk and exhaustibility for explaining the evolution of shadow prices of marginal units of exhaustible natural resources in capital resource economies it is shown that the pricing kernel function required for socially valuing marginal units of exhaustible resource hereafter called the exhaustion stochastic discount factor combines a factor that discounts for risk and another factor that discounts for resource exhaustion over time the social rate of return on the marginal unit of resource stock adds to the risk premium an exhaustion premium that accounts for the resource depletion over time in this setting the principle of no arbitrage holds by extending asset class dimensions to include not only a risk dimension but also an exhaustibility dimension

are we consuming too much this paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive we consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness or insufficiency of current consumption one is an intertemporal utility maximization criterion actual current consumption is deemed excessive if it is higher than the level of current consumption on the consumption path that maximizes the present discounted value of utility the other is a sustainability criterion which requires that current consumption be consistent with non declining living standards over time we extend previous theoretical approaches by offering a formula for the sustainability criterion that accounts for population growth and technological change in applying this formula we find that some poor regions of the world are failing to meet the sustainability criterion in these regions genuine wealth per capita is falling as investments in human and manufactured capital are not sufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital

dynamics of moving average rules in a continuous time financial market model within a continuous time framework this paper proposes a stochastic heterogeneous agent model ham of flnancial markets with time delays to unify various moving average rules used in discrete time hams the time delay represents a memory length of a moving average rule in discrete time hams intuitive conditions for the stability of the fundamental price of the deterministic model in terms of agents behavior parameters and memory length are obtained it is found that an increase in memory length not only can destabilize the market price resulting in oscillatory market price characterized by a hopf bifurcation but also can stabilize an otherwise unstable market price leading to stability switching as the memory length increases numerical simulations show that the stochastic model is able to characterize long deviations of the market price from its fundamental price and excess volatility and generate most of the stylized facts observed in flnancial markets

survey evidence on diffusion of interest and information among investors abstract questionnaire surveys of institutional and individual investors were undertaken to learn about patterns of communications it was found that direct interpersonal communications are very important in investor decisions questions elicited what fraction of investors were unsystematic and allowed themselves to be influenced by word of mouth communications or other salient stimuli randomly sampled investors were studied as well as investors in stocks whose price had recently increased dramatically contagion or epidemic models of financial markets are proposed in which interest in individual stocks is spread by word of mouth the survey evidence is interpreted as supporting such models

the price dynamics of common trading strategies a deterministic trading strategy can be regarded as a signal processing element that uses external information and past prices as inputs and incorporates them into future prices this paper uses a market maker based method of price formation to study the price dynamics induced by several commonly used financial trading strategies showing how they amplify noise induce structure in prices and cause phenomena such as excess and clustered volatility

ergodic fluctuations in deterministic economic models abstract nonperiodic business fluctuations are shown to exist with positive measure generically and to behave like stationary stochastic processes in the standard dynamic macro model the implication is that so called chaotic fluctuations are probable for random initial conditions in a large class of recursive economies

microfoundations for switching behavior in heterogeneous agent models an experiment we run a laboratory experiment to study how human subjects switch between several profitable alternatives framed as mutual funds in order to provide a microfoundation for so called heterogeneous agent models the participants in our experiment have to choose repeatedly between two three or four experimental funds the time series of fund returns are exogenously generated prior to the experiment and participants are paid for each period according to the return of the fund they choose for most cases participants decisions can be successfully described by a discrete choice switching model often applied in heterogeneous agent models provided that a predisposition toward one of the funds is included the estimated intensity of choice parameter of the discrete choice model depends on the structure of the fund returns in particular it increases with correlation between past and future returns this suggests human subjects do not myopically chase past returns but are more likely to do so when past returns are more predictive of future returns a feature that is absent in the standard heterogeneous agent models

superstitious seasonality in precious metals markets evidence from garch models with time varying skewness and kurtosis in this article we analyse whether the friday the 13th effect documented by kolb and rodriguez 1987 can be observed in precious metals markets specifically we use dummy augmented garch models to investigate the impact of this specific calendar day on the conditional means of gold silver palladium and platinum returns the specification of the garch model follows a flexible class recently proposed by leon et al 2005 that incorporates time varying skewness and kurtosis by applying a gram charlier series expansion of the normal density function our results for the period from july 1996 to august 2013 provide three important insights first there is no evidence that human superstition regarding bad luck fridays affects precious metals markets in a negative way i e returns on fridays the 13th are not significantly lower than on regular fridays second besides showing robustness in a variety of settings we can confirm this main result in a sensitivity check where we replace the dummy variables

some further evidence on the stochastic properties of systematic risk although there is consensus in the finance literature that the beta risk of equity securities is stochastic there is considerable disagreement as to whether the var iation is purely random or exhibits autocorrelation through time to investigate this issue the authors employ a model that allows beta t o exhibit both random and autoregressive behavior simultaneously the y test this model against alternative specifications on a large sampl e of individual securities and randomly formed portfolios comprising 10 50 and 100 securities results are also presented for portfolios formed according to firm size copyright 1987 by the university of chicago

the effect of additions to or deletions from the tse 300 index on canadian share prices in this paper we examine shares that have been added to or deleted from the tse 300 index to determine whether abnormal price movements have occurred we apply the dummy variable approach to event study methodology and adjust the estimated standard errors for arbitrary heteroscedasticity and clustering of events we also use a non parametric method of inference like authors of u s studies we find that the market reacts positively to inclusion and negatively to deletion albeit not significantly in the latter case the information content of inclusion does not account for the entire share price response lending support to the hypothesis of increased purchases by index funds jel classification g14 ce texte examine les titres qui ont ete ajoutes ou soustraits de l indice tse 300 pour determiner si des mouvements anormaux de prix s en sont suivis on utilise l approche des variables fictives dans le cadre d une methodologie qui etudie l impact d evenements et on ajuste les erreurs standards pour tenir compte de l heteroskedasticite arbitraire et de l agglomeration d evenements on utilise aussi une methode non parametrique d inference comme dans des etudes americaines du meme type on decouvre que les marche reagit positivement a l inclusion et negativement a la soustraction d un titre mais que l effet n est pas significatif dans ce dernier cas le contenu informationnel de l inclusion n explique pas entierement le mouvement dans le prix du titre ce qui apporte un support a l hypothese de l impact des achats accrus par des fonds indexes