In this paper we present, propose and examine additional membership functions as also we propose least squares with genetic algorithms optimization in order to find the optimum fuzzy membership functions parameters. More specifically, we present the tangent hyperbolic, Gaussian and Generalized...

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers related to banking, credit markets and financial stability. Paper [I] presents a credit market model and finds, using an agent based modeling approach, that credit crunches have a tendency to occur; even when credit markets are almost entirely...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This is a draft Chapter from a book by the authors on “Levy Driven Volatility Modelsâ€.

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HSMMs) provide flexible, general-purpose models for univariate and multivariate time series. Although interest in HMMs and HSMMs has continuously increased during the past years, and numerous articles on theoretical and practical aspects...

The recent observed decline of business cycle variability suggests that broad macroeconomic risk may have fallen as well. This may in turn have some impact on equity risk premia. We investigate the latent structures in the volatilities of the business cycle and stock market valuations by...

The fluctuation of stock prices is modelled as a sequence of temporary equilibria on a financial market with different types of agents. We summarize joint work with M. Schweizer on the class of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes in a random environment which appears in the diffusion limit. Moreover,...

This paper analyses the role of investor sentiment in the contemporaneous dynamics of spot and futures markets and in volatility spillovers between them. To explore this issue, we analyse spot and futures markets on stock market indexes in different countries: the S&P500 for the US, and a...

This study presents a first comparative analysis of Lasso-type (Lasso, adaptive Lasso, elastic net) and heuristic subset selection methods. Although the Lasso has shown success in many situations, it has some limitations. In particular, inconsistent results are obtained for pairwise highly...

This paper tries to connect the theory of genetic algorithm (GA) learning to evolutionary game theory. It is shown that economic learning via genetic algorithms can be described as a specific form of evolutionary game. It will be pointed out that GA learning results in a series of near Nash...