We show how simple statistical techniques for capturing critical transitions used in natural sciences, fail to capture economic regime shifts. This implies that we need to use model-based approaches to identify critical transitions. We apply a heterogenous agents model in a standard housing...

This paper investigates the ability of the adaptive learning approach to replicate the expectations of professional forecasters. For a range of macroeconomic and financial variables, we compare constant and decreasing gain learning models to simple, yet powerful benchmark models. We find that...

We introduce heterogeneous expectations in a standard housing market model linking housing rental levels to fundamental buying prices. Using quarterly data we estimate the model parameters for eight different countries, US, UK, NL, JP, CH, ES, SE and BE. We find that the data support...

In this paper we study why, and when, and in what form, a satisficing strategy is a better bet for survival, than a strategy which uses the best available information in attempting to optimize the outcome. We prove that, under severe uncertainty, a robust-satisficing decision has a better...

In situations of relative calm and certainty, policy makers have confidence in the mechanisms at work and feel capable of attaining precise and ambitious results. As the environment becomes less and less certain, policy makers are confronted with the fact that there is a trade-off between the...

(paper is in Dutch) This study surveys the behavioural finance literature. It discusses both the literature that incorporates behavioural considerations into rational models, and the literature that concentrates on the role of prospect theory and the effect of cognitive-psychological mechanisms...

This paper investigates whether the fall in the euro-dollar exchange rate in the course of 2000 can be partly attributed to asymmetric reactions by investors to economic and political news. We have studied the daily euro-dollar exchange rate changes recorded from 1 April 2000 to the first...

This paper surveys the behavioural finance explanation of six puzzles of finance. These puzzles are: stock price under- and overreactions, excessive trading and the gender puzzle, financial hypes and panic, the equity premium puzzle, the winner/loser puzzle and the dividend puzzle. After an...