Comparison of macroeconomic simulation models, particularly agent-based models (ABMs), with more traditional approaches such as VAR and DSGE models has long been identified as an important yet problematic issue in the literature. This is due to the fact that many such simulations have been...

We develop a measure of systemic stress for the Italian financial markets (FCI-IT) that aggregates information from five major segments of the whole financial system, i.e. the money market, the bond market, the equity market, the foreign exchange market and the market for stocks of financial...

The use of fundamentalist traders in the stock market models is problematic since fundamental values in the real world are unknown. Yet, in the literature to date, fundamentalists are often required to replicate key stylized facts. The authors present an agent-based model of the stock market in...

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

The forecast evaluation literature has traditionally focused on methods for assessing point-forecasts. However, in the context of risk models, interest centers on more than just a single point of the forecast distribution. For example, value-at-risk (VaR) models which are currently in extremely...