Financialization of commodity markets has been a broadly discussed topic in recent years. However, its implications for commodity investors have not yet been fully explored. This paper concentrates on the macroeconomic determinants of commodity returns in financialized and non-financialized...

Asset returns are not correlated with the business cycle but are primarily caused by the economic cycles. To validate this claim, economic cycles are first rigorously defined, namely the classical business cycle and the growth cycle, better known as the output gap. The description of different...

Recent studies show that volatility-managed equity portfolios realize higher Sharpe ratios than portfolios with a constant notional exposure. We show that this result only holds for “risk assets”, such as equity and credit, and link this to the so-called leverage effect for those assets. In...

The paper introduces a portfolio-based Keynesian dynamic stochastic general disequilibrium model. It is an endogenous phase-switching macroeconomic model of risky investment where the rational expectation is applied in the financial market with three financial instruments of stocks, credits, and...

What are the effects of financial integration on global comovement? Using a standard two-country DSGE model, I show that in response to country-specific supply shocks higher exposure to foreign assets leads to lower cross-country output correlations, while the opposite is true for...

Given the economy's complex behavior and sudden transitions as evidenced in the 2007-08 crisis, agent-based models are widely considered a promising alternative to current macroeconomic practice dominated by DSGE models. Their failure is commonly interpreted as a failure to incorporate...

Many policy-makers and researchers view the recent financial and real economic crises across North America, Europe and beyond as a global phenomenon. Some have argued that this global recession has a common source: the U.S. financial crisis. This paper investigates the extent to which a credit...

Empirical studies showed that firm-level volatility has been increasing but the aggregate volatility has been decreasing in the US for the post-war period. This paper proposes a unified explanation for these diverging trends. Our explanation is based on a story of financial development -...

Assessments of investors' risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields results which seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding how such indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The present paper seeks to contribute to this...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...