The equity premium forecasting literature provides ample evidence of predictability for both fundamental economic variables and non-fundamental variables, such as time-series momentum. In this paper, we study the role of investor setiment in equity premium predictability. Consistent with the...

In this paper, we discuss how to model credit risk under the benchmark approach. Firstly we introduce an affine credit risk model. We then show how to price credit default swaps (CDSs) and introduce credit valuation adjustment (CVA) as an extension of CDSs. In particular, our model can capture...

The paper derives a parsimonious two-component affine diffusion model for a world stock index to capture the dynamics of aggregate wealth. The observable state variables of the model are the normalized index and the inverse of the stochastic market activity, both modeled as square root...

The paper derives a parsimonious two-component affine diffusion model with one driving Brownian motion to capture the dynamics of oil prices. It can be observed that the oil price behaves in some sense similarly to the US dollar. However, there are also clear differences. To identify these the...

This article explores nonlinearities in the response of speculators’ trading activity to price changes in live cattle, corn, and lean hog futures markets. Analyzing weekly data from March 4, 1997 to December 27, 2005, we reject linearity in all of these markets. Using smooth transition...

The use of a conditionally unbiased, but imperfect, volatility proxy can lead to undesirable outcomes in standard methods for comparing conditional variance forecasts. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on functional form of the loss function for the ranking of competing volatility...

This paper examines experimentally two common conjectures in the popular literature on financial markets: that they are swayed by emotion and that they behave like a 'crowd'. We find consistent evidence that deviations of prices from fundamental value depend on the emotion of excitement and on...

Financial markets are typically characterized by high (low) price level and low (high) volatility during boom (bust) periods, suggesting that price and volatility tend to move together with different market conditions/states. By proposing a simple heterogeneous agent model of fundamentalists and...

This paper extends the analysis of the seminal paper of Brock and Hommes (1998) on heterogeneous beliefs and routes to chaos in a simple asset price model in discrete-time to a model in continuous-time. The resulting model characterized mathematically by a system of stochastic delay differential...

We construct a time-varying factor model of hedge fund returns that accounts for market risk, leverage, illiquidity and tail events. We also adjust for database biases arising from voluntary self-reporting. Using a constant beta model, we find no evidence of excess returns for the average hedge...