We present a medium-scale dynamic factor model to estimate and forecast the rate of growth of the Spanish economy in the very short term. The intermediate size of the model overcomes the serious specification problems associated with large scale-models and the implicit loss of information of...

We investigate the impact of agent communication networks on prices in an artificial stock market. Networks with different centralization measures are tested for their effect on the volatility of prices. Trading strategies diffuse through the different network topologies, mimetic contagion...

It is a well-known fact that most of the asset returns tend to be skewed and heavytailed. Heavy tailed distributions such as the Student’s t distribution and Stable distribution are commonly used in finance to model asset returns that areheavy tailed. Additionally, Stable distribution allows...

Even though correlations between different economies' stock markets have empirically increased over time, it would have been advantageously to invest in developing countries' stock markets such as the Indian stock market, instead of investing in the US-stock market when considering the overall...

Standard consumption-based models typically fail in pricing asset returns. In a famous seminal paper, Mehra and Prescott (1985), using a standard consumption model, prove the presence of a puzzle (i.e. equity premium puzzle). The recent financial literature still has to provide a convincing...

Passive investment strategies basically aim to replicate an underlying benchmark. Thereby, the management usually selects a subset of stocks being employed in the optimization procedure. Apart from the optimization procedure, the stock selection approach determines the stock portfolios's...

Even though a random walk process is from a statistical point of view not predictable, some movements can be correlated with specific events concerning other variables. Then, predictable patterns may arise being dependent on this joint event. There is evidence given that equity price busts being...