Although it is often said that economics is too much like physics, to a physicist economics is not at all like physics. The difference is in the scientific methods of the two fields: theoretical economics uses a top down approach in which hypothesis and mathematical rigor come first and...

If the historical average annual real interest rate is m 0, and if the world is stationary, should consumption in the distant future be discounted at the rate of m per year? Suppose the annual real interest rate r(t) reverts to m according to the Ornstein Uhlenbeck (OU) continuous time process...

We present a simple agent-based model of a financial system composed of leveraged investors such as banks that invest in stocks and manage their risk using a Value-at-Risk constraint, based on historical observations of asset prices. The Value-at-Risk constraint implies that when perceived risk...

We develop a theory for the market impact of large trading orders, which we call <italic>metaorders</italic> because they are typically split into small pieces and executed incrementally. Market impact is empirically observed to be a concave function of metaorder size, i.e. the impact per share of large...

We build a simple model of leveraged asset purchases with margin calls. Investment funds use what is perhaps the most basic financial strategy, called ‘value investing’, i.e. systematically attempting to buy underpriced assets. When funds do not borrow, the price fluctuations of the asset...

Common asset holdings are widely believed to have been the primary vector of contagion in the recent financial crisis. We develop a network approach to the amplification of financial contagion due to the combination of overlapping portfolios and leverage, and we show how it can be understood in...

Since beginning of the 2008 financial crisis almost half a trillion euros have been spent to financially assist EU member states in taxpayer-funded bail-outs. These crisis resolutions are often accompanied by austerity programs causing political and social friction on both domestic and...

We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g. heads or tails in a coin toss) depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes. By varying the...

Conventional economics supposes that agents value the present vs. the future using an exponential discounting function. In contrast, experiments with animals and humans suggest that agents are better described as hyperbolic discounters, whose discount function decays much more slowly at large...

We study the problem of what causes prices to change. We define the mechanical impact of a trading order as the change in future prices in the absence of any future changes in decision making, and its it informational impact as the remainder of the total impact once mechanical impact is removed....