"I have spent my whole professional life as an international economist thinking and writing about economic geography, without being aware of it," begins Paul Krugman in the readable and anecdotal style that has become a hallmark of his writings. Krugman observes that his own shortcomings in...

In this document we analyze the evidence of daily seasonality found in the weekly price variations of food, beverages, and tobacco in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City. Our research is based on the daily price quotes of 2,724 goods, collected by Banco de México for the Consumer Price Index...

This study models the volatility present in the inter day returns in the stock of the two major national indices of India. Sensitive Index or Sensex related to Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and Nifty associated with National Stock Exchange (NSE). The objective is to model the phenomena of...

Over the years since airline deregulation five of the remaining U.S. legacy carriers lost money on mergers that cost them a total of $29.6 billion. The combined market cap of these carriers at the end of 2007 was $15.5 billion. In other words, their return on merger investments was -48%. Why?...

We study the random matrix technique for the financial data correlations. The usual correlation matrices are known to be noise dressed. We apply a new and alternative method to estimate the true correlations. To be more efficient in getting rid of the error due to the finite observations of the...

Economic theory reduces the concept of rationality to internal consistency. The practice of economics, however, distinguishes between rational and irrational beliefs. There is therefore an interest in a theory of rational beliefs, and of the process by which beliefs are generated and justified....

The paper describes an analogy between two fields of study inspired by 'folk science' in distant scientific disciplines: financial economics and pharmacology. As the methodology of ethnopharmacology is much more developed than the methodology of scientific investigation of technical analysis,...

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...

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...

This paper is concerned with defining the characteristics of behavioral economics (BE), identifying the different strands of BE, and carefully comparing BE to mainstream economics. The job of comparison is first to identify the key dimensions (related to its approach to science) along which BE,...