We consider a financial market model with a large number of interacting agents. Investors are heterogeneous in their expectations about the future evolution of an asset price process. Their current expectation is based on the previous states of their "neighbors" and on a random signal about the...

According to the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model, expected rates of return on individual stocks differ only because of their different levels of non-diversifiable risk (beta). However, Fama/French (1992) show that the two variables size and book-to-market ratio capture the...

We study an extension of the classical B1ack-Scholes model which accounts for feedback effects from trading in an imperfectly elastic market. The proposed semi-martingale model may be viewed as a compromise between the diffusion approach in, e.g., (Cuoco and Cvitanic 1998), (Cvitanic and Ma...

Political stock markets (PSM) are sometimes seen as substitutes for opinion polls. On the bases of a behavioral model, specific preconditions were drawn out under which manipulation in PSM can weaken this argument. Evidence for manipulation is reported from the data of two separate PSM during...

We consider a financial market model with interacting agents and study the long run behaviour of both aggregate behaviour and equilibrium prices. Investors are heterogeneous in their price expectations and they get stochastic signals about the "mood" of the market described by the empirical...

In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy shocks....

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

Stochastic Volatility (SV) models are widely used in financial applications. To decide whether standard parametric restrictions are justified for a given dataset, a statistical test is required. In this paper, we develop such a test based on the linear state space representation. We provide a...