Securitized real estate returns have traditionally been forecasted using economic variables. However, no consensus exists regarding the variables to use. Financial and real estate factors have recently emerged as an alternative set of variables useful in forecasting securitized real estate...

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...

We propose a reduced form model for the Minskian dynamics of liquidity and of asset prices in terms of the so-called financial accelerator mechanism. In a nutshell, credit creation is driven by the market value of the financial assets employed as collateral in the bank loans. This leads to a...

The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

We present a self-consistent model for explosive financial bubbles, which combines a mean-reverting volatility process and a stochastic conditional return which reflects nonlinear positive feedbacks and continuous updates of the investors’ beliefs and sentiments. The conditional expected...

Identifying unambiguously the presence of a bubble in an asset price remains an unsolved problem in standard econometric and financial economic approaches. A large part of the problem is that the fundamental value of an asset is, in general, not directly observable and it is poorly constrained...

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 Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model of rational expectation bubbles with finite-time singular crash hazard rates has been developed to describe the dynamics of financial bubbles and crashes. It has been applied successfully to a large variety of financial bubbles in many different markets....

We present an extension of the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model to include an additional pricing factor called the “Zipf factor”, which describes the diversification risk of the stock market portfolio. Keeping all the dynamical characteristics of a bubble described in the JLS model, the...

Prediction (or information) markets are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoff depends on unknown future events. Studying prediction markets allows to avoid many problems, which arise in some artificially designed behavioral experiments investigating collective decision making...