This paper develops a methodology for estimating the parameters of dynamic opinion or expectation formation processes with social interactions. We study a simple stochastic framework of a collective process of opinion formation by a group of agents who face a binary decision problem. The...

This chapter reviews recent research adopting methods from statistical physics in theoretical or empirical work in economics and finance. The bulk of what has recently become known as 'econophysics' in broader circles draws its motivation from observed scaling laws in financial markets and the...

High-frequency financial data are characterized by a set of ubiquitous statistical properties that prevail with surprising uniformity. While these 'stylized facts' have been well-known for decades, attempts at their behavioral explanation have remained scarce. However, recently a new branch of...

In this paper we consider daily financial data from various sources (stock market indices, foreign exchange rates and bonds) and analyze their multi-scaling properties by estimating the parameters of a Markov-switching multifractal model (MSM) with Lognormal volatility components. In order to...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioural mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of...

Processes of social opinion formation might be dominated by a set of highly influential agents acting as 'opinion leaders'. Here we explore whether such a perspective could shed light on the dynamics of a well known economic sentiment index. To this end, we hypothesize that the respondents of...

The volatility specification of the Markov-switching Multifractal (MSM) model is proposed as an alternative mechanism for realized volatility (RV). We estimate the RV-MSM model via Generalized Method of Moments and perform forecasting by means of best linear forecasts derived via the...

Identifiability of the parameters is an important precondition for consistent estimation of models designed to describe empirical phenomena. Nevertheless, many estimation exercises proceed without a preliminary investigation into the identifiability of its models. As a consequence, the estimates...