In a market-based financial system, banking and capital market developments are inseparable. We document evidence that balance sheets of market-based financial intermediaries provide a window on the transmission of monetary policy through capital market conditions. Short-term interest rates are...

This chapter reviews recent research adopting methods from statistical physics in theoretical or empirical work in economics and finance. The bulk of what has recently become known as 'econophysics' in broader circles draws its motivation from observed scaling laws in financial markets and the...

One of the most robust stylized facts in macroeconomics is the forecasting power of the term spread for future real activity. The economic rationale for this forecasting power usually appeals to expectations of future interest rates, which affect the slope of the term structure. In this paper,...

Fluctuations in the aggregate balance sheets of financial intermediaries provide a window on the joint determination of asset prices and macroeconomic aggregates. We document that financial intermediary balance sheets contain strong predictive power for future excess returns on a broad set of...

Simulations of agent-based models have shown that the stylized facts (unit-root, fat tails and volatility clustering) of financial markets have a possible explanation in the interactions among agents. However, the complexity, originating from the presence of non-linearity and interactions, often...

Financial markets (share markets, foreign exchange markets and others) are all characterized by a number of universal power laws. The most prominent example is the ubiquitous finding of a robust, approximately cubic power law characterizing the distribution of large returns. A similarly robust...

This review deals with several microscopic models of financial markets which have been studied by economists and physicists over the last decade: Kim- Markowitz, Levy-Levy-Solomon, Cont-Bouchaud, Solomon-Weisbuch, Lux-Marchesi, Donangelo-Sneppen and Solomon-Levy-Huang. After an overview of...