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...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavytail feature...

This paper considers financial, operational, solvency, and performance ratios, in order to detect when there were balance sheets’ variations related to the 1994 Mexican currency crisis. Quarterly results for 88 non-financial Mexican companies that survived the crisis are used, and tests for...

We construct the first measure of collateral re-use at the bank and bond level for the European repo market using a regulatory transaction dataset. We show that banks materially increase the rate of re-use in response to tightened asset scarcity induced by the Eurosystem's asset purchase...

This paper investigates how cryptocurrencies relate to concepts such as bubbles, Ponzi-schemes and digital gold in a tractable model for cryptocurrency prices. Investors in the baseline equilibrium hold coins to sell them at a profit to future users if they anticipate in increase in...

This paper considers a simple Continuous Beliefs System (CBS) toinvestigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioralassumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating ofbeliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) amongagents. The recently introduced concept of...

A number of recent theoretical studies have explored trading in fragmented markets, e.g. Biais etal. (2000), a phenomenon increasingly witnessed in modern markets. The key assumptiongenerating the results is that there is at least one liquidity demander exploiting access to allmarkets 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. marketand, potentially, in both markets simultaneously. We use a state space model to study 24-hour price discovery. As opposed to thestandard variance ratio'' approach,...

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this nonparametric measure is not predisposed toward the normal distribution and can allow for nonlinear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries suggest...

These notes review two simple heterogeneous agent models in economics and finance. The first is a cobweb model with rational versus naive agents introduced in Brock and Hommes (1997). The second is an asset pricing model with fundamentalists versus technical traders introduced in Brock and...