Alan Greenspan's paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the FED, the IMF or the regulators in the years leading to...

This paper analyzes the state and impact of financial literacy in a so far largely neglected group: the middle class in emerging economies. This group is of increasing importance for implementing structural change, including the proper use of sophisticated financial products. We survey middle...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

Based on criteria of mathematical simplicity and consistency with empirical market data, a stochastic volatility model is constructed, the volatility process being driven by fractional noise. Price return statistics and asymptotic behavior are derived from the model and compared with data....

We use weekly survey data on short-term and medium-term sentiment of German investors in order to study the causal relationship between investors' mood and subsequent stock price changes. In contrast to extant literature for other countries, a tri-variate vector autoregression for short-run...

This paper provides micro-econometric evidence on the relevance of non-market interaction for the timing of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the French and German primary equity markets. The surge of IPO volume in the late 1990s appears to be consistent with rational expectations, not with...

We analyze the stock prices of the S&P market from 1987 to 2012 with the covariance matrix of the firm returns determined in time windows of several years. The eigenvector belonging to the leading eigenvalue (market) exhibits in its long term time dependence a phase transition with an order...

In this paper we analyze transitions in the stock markets of the US, the UK, and Germany. For all this markets we find that while the markets were focused on stocks from the IT and technology sector around the year 2000, this focus has vanished and the markets have mostly moved towards a focus...

This study analyzes the emergence of secular stagnation as the consequence of a rise in the preference for liquidity. Such a rise is caused by a persistent set of pessimistic expectations. This study also investigates the effectiveness of a broad range of demand-management policies in dealing...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...