This paper argues that imperfect corporate control is a determinant of market structure. We integrate a widely accepted version of the separation of ownership and control -- Jensen's (1986) 'empire-building' hypothesis -- into a dynamic oligopoly model. Our main observation is that, due to...

This paper integrates the literature of Mortgage Design with that of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) to present a novel way of mortgage financing (with a zero interest rate) using cooperatives. This mode of financing dissipates credit (default) risk better than the normal mode...

The assessment of models of financial market behaviour requires evaluation tools. When complexity hinders a direct estimation approach, e.g., for agent based microsimulation models or multifractal models, simulation based estimators might provide an alternative. In order to apply such...

Within the context of an agent-based model, model selection by the economic agents is introduced and investigated. To achieve this, a specific agent, the “economic research instituteâ€, is set up and produces regular forecasts of the economy which are published to the economic agents....

Some researchers and many practitioners have move from the classic mean-variance (Markowitz, 1959) portfolio theory to a new portfolio optimization framework based on downside-risk measures that are more appropriate to the investor’s preferences. Moreover, several studies (Friedman and...

The termstructure of interest rates is an instrument that gives us the necessary information for valueing deterministic financial cash flows, measuring the economic market expectations and testing the effectiveness of monetary policy decissions. However, it is not directly observable and needs...

Markov switching regression processes belong to the class of Hidden Markov models (HMMs). They provide a higher flexibility than, for example, simple (auto)regression. The main reason for their popularity is the convenient interpretability. For sufficiently long time series, the different...

This paper presents a numerical nonlinear dynamic programming algorithm for solving so-called optimal learning or adaptive control problems. These are decision problems with unknown parameters where the decisionmaker updates beliefs by Bayes rule. The updating equations are nonlinear. As a...

Dynamic games are used to analyze dynamic strategic interactions. While existence of equilibrium can often be proved by conventional methods, uniqueness is much more difficult to establish. If a game reduces to solving a system of polynomial equations, then one could use algorithms for finding...

We solve the optimal saving/portfolio-choice problem in an intertemporal recursive utility framework. Our solution to this problem is sufficiently general to allow (i) risk aversion to vary independently of intertemporal substitution, (ii) many risky assets, (iii) stochastic labor income that...