We study how plan sponsors choose investment management firms from their opportunity set when delegating $1.6 trillion in assets between 2002 and 2017. Two factors play an influential role in choice: pre-hiring returns, and pre-existing personal connections between personnel at the plan (or...

Using virtual stock markets with artificial interacting software investors, aka agent-based models (ABMs), we present a method to reverse engineer real-world financial time series. We model financial markets as made of a large number of interacting boundedly rational agents. By optimizing the...

We introduce the concept of “negative bubbles” as the mirror image of standard financial bubbles, in which positive feedback mechanisms may lead to transient accelerating price falls. To model these negative bubbles, we adapt the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model of rational expectation...

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

Using a recently introduced method to quantify the time varying lead-lag dependencies between pairs of economic time series (the thermal optimal path method), we test two fundamental tenets of the theory of fixed income: (i) the stock market variations and the yield changes should be...

The use of mixture distributions for modeling asset returns has a long history in finance. New methods of demonstrating support for the presence of mixtures in the multivariate case are provided. The use of a two-component multivariate normal mixture distribution, coupled with shrinkage via a...

Sentiment analysis is applied to the Federal Reserve's documents relating to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). A new method of rating the sentiment of texts is developed through the creation of a 100 000 word sentiment dictionary, and is used to estimate the sentiment of the Beige Book...

We present a careful analysis of possible issues of the application of the self-excited Hawkes process to high-frequency financial data and carefully analyze a set of effects that lead to significant biases in the estimation of the "criticality index'' n that quantifies the degree of endogeneity...

The aim of this paper is to investigate long-term portfolio management in a fully structural macro- financial framework. First, we estimate a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model that describes the dynamic of the US economy and financial markets. In addition to the typical...

A new multivariate time series model with various attractive properties is motivated and studied. By extending the CCC model in several ways, it allows for all the primary stylized facts of financial asset returns, including volatility clustering, non-normality (excess kurtosis and asymmetry),...