The purpose of this paper is to provide a non-technical exposition of the main conclusions of the theory of Rational Belief Equilibrium (RBE) for market volatility. It is argued that the theory of Rational Belief Equilibria (RBE) provides a unified paradigm for explaining market volatility by...

Endogenous Uncertainty is that component of economic risk and market volatility which is propagated within the economy by the beliefs and actions of agents. The theory of Rational Belief (see Kurz [1994]) permits rational agents to hold diverse beliefs and consequently, a Rational Belief...

A popular proposal for reforming social security is to supplement or replace traditional publicly financed benefits with a new system of mandatory defined-contribution private pensions. Proponents claim that private plans offer better returns than traditional social security. To achieve higher...

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 had major implications for the foreign exchange market. We review events and implications for exchange rates, volatility, returns to currency investing, and transaction costs. This blow-by-blow" narrative is intended to be a resource for researchers seeking a...

This paper proposes an explanation of the shifts in the volatility of exchange rate returns that relies on standard present value exchange rate models. Agents are uncertain about the true data generating model and deal with the model uncertainty by making inference on the models and their...

This paper employs the unrestricted extended constant conditional correlation GARCH specification proposed in Conrad and Karanasos (2008) to examine the intertemporal relationship between the uncertainties of inflation and output growth in the US. We find that inflation uncertainty effects...

We analyse the interaction between private agents? uncertainty about inflation target and the central bank's data uncertainty. In our model, private agents update their perceived inflation target and the central bank estimates unobservable economic shocks as well as the perceived inflation...

The situation of a limited availability of historical data is frequently encountered in portfolio risk estimation, especially in credit risk estimation. This makes it, for example, difficult to find temporal structures with statistical significance in the data on the single asset level. By...

In this paper we analyze exemplarily the volatility of the internal rates of return of the German pension system over the life-cycle of an individual born in 1957. The outcome is compared to an alternative defined-contribution or defined-benefit policy. Based on the actual data, our resultsshow...

There appears to be a consensus that the recent instability in global financial markets may be attributable in part to the failure of financial modeling. More specifically, current risk models have failed to properly assess the risks associated with large adverse stock price behavior. In this...