We examine whether the information contained in social media (Twitter & Facebook) and web search queries (Google) influences financial markets. Using a multivariate system and focussing on Eurozone’s peripheral countries, the GIIPS (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), we show that...

This paper reveals the underlying market’s preferences over the on going Euro area sovereign debt crisis. It builds on a loss function with reference to the ‘basis’, the difference between the spread over swap and Credit Default Swap (CDS) for sovereign bonds. This loss function is general...

Allowing for a richer information structure than usual, we show that rational traders’ calculation with short-term price fluctuations may heavily influence their behaviour even if the interim price is not influenced by non-rational agents i.e. there is no noise trader risk. Instead, traders...

This paper solves for optimal international portfolio choice in the presence of liquidity constraints and undiversifiable labor income risk. Optimal portfolios are internationally diversified while positive correlation between domestic stock market returns and permanent labor income shocks can...

Motivated by the success of internal habit formation preferences in explaining asset pricing puzzles, we introduce these preferences in a life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice with liquidity constraints, undiversifiable labor income risk and stock-market participation costs. In...

This paper shows that in a non-representative agent model in which households face short selling constraints and labor income risk, in the form of both uninsurable shocks and a common aggregate component, small differences in the correlation between aggregate labor income shocks and domestic and...

We solve a model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents that generates a large equity premium, while simultaneously matching stock market participation and individual asset holdings. The high risk premium is driven by incomplete risk sharing among stockholders, which results from the...

This paper extends the model proposed by Goodhart, Sunirand, and Tsomocos (2003, 2004a, b) to an infinite horizon setting. Thus, we are able to assess how the model conforms with the time series data of the U.K. banking system. We conclude that, since the model performs satisfactorily, it can be...

This paper surveys asset allocation methods that extend the traditional approach. An important feature of the traditional approach is that measures the risk and return tradeoff in terms of mean and variance of final wealth. However, there are also other important features that are not always...

This paper solves an empirically parameterized model of households’ optimal demand for nominal and inflation indexed annuities. The model incorporates mortality, inflation, and real interest rate risk. The model draws some interesting predictions. First, the welfare calculations on the access...