A number of recent theoretical studies have explored trading in fragmented markets, e.g. Biais et al. (2000), a phenomenon increasingly witnessed in modern markets. The key assumption generating the results is that there is at least one liquidity demander exploiting access to all markets by...

U.S. trading in non-U.S. stocks has grown dramatically. Round-the-clock, these stocks trade in the home market, in the U.S. market and, potentially, in both markets simultaneously. We use a state space model to study 24-hour price discovery. As opposed to the standard "variance ratio'' approach,...

The sum of squared intraday returns provides an unbiased and almost error-free measure of ex-post volatility. In this paper we develop a nonlinear Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) model for realized volatility, which accommodates level shifts, day-of-the-week...

We study the possibility for international diversification of catastrophe risk by the insurance sector. Adopting the argument that large insurance losses may be a `globalizing factor' for the industry, we study the dependence of geographically distant insurance markets via equity returns. In...

This paper documents the existence of large structural breaks in the unconditional correlations among the British pound, Norwegian krone, Swedish krona, Swiss franc, and euro exchange rates (against the US dollar) during the period 1994-2003. Using the framework of dynamic conditional...

Interacting agents in finance represent a behavioral, agent-based approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex adaptive systems consisting of many boundedly rational agents interacting through simple heterogeneous investment strategies, constantly adapting their behavior in response...

This paper considers a simple Continuous Beliefs System (CBS) to investigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioral assumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating of beliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) among agents. The recently introduced...

This paper surveys work on dynamic heterogeneous agent models (HAMs) in economics and finance. Emphasis is given to simple models that, at least to some extent, are tractable by analytic methods in combination with computational tools. Most of these models are behavioral models with boundedly...

We estimate a dynamic asset pricing model characterized by heterogeneous boundedly rational agents. The fundamental value of the risky asset is publicly available to all agents, but they have different beliefs about the persistence of deviations of stock prices from the fundamental benchmark. An...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...