Download or read book Essays on Heterogeneous Beliefs in Financial Markets written by Hao Sun and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Role of Beliefs in Financial Markets written by Mohamad Mahmoud Al-Ississ and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third essay investigates a seldom explored relationship, that between religion and financial markets. This study examines the effect of religious experience during the Muslim holy days of Ramadan and Ashoura on the daily returns and trading volume of seventeen Muslim financial markets. It uses the special characteristics of the Muslim lunar calendar to isolate the elusive effect of faith. The study documents statistically significant changes in daily returns and trading volume associated with religious experiences. The essay utilizes the heterogeneity of worship intensity within Ramadan as a natural experiment to validate the results' robustness.

Download or read book Essays on International Comovements of Financial Markets written by Yusuke Tateno and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International portfolio diversification is beneficial only if asset returns are not significantly correlated across countries. Therefore, it is essential for investors who want to make an appropriate portfolio selection to understand the nature of asset return correlations. This thesis consists of three essays on international comovements of financial markets. The first essay analyzes the effects of heterogeneous beliefs and learning on international comovements of equity returns and portfolio rebalancing mechanism. This essay develops a continuous-time general equilibrium model in a two-asset and two-good economy with two representative agents, who differ in perceived rates of output growth and accuracy of beliefs. The equilibrium correlations of equity returns across counties and optimal portfolios are expressed in terms of the differences in beliefs. The main findings are: (1) the differences in perceived rates of output growth generate equity home or foreign bias, resulting in lower crosscountry equity return correlations; and (2) the volatilities of optimal portfolios and capital flows increase with the differences in perceived output growth and with the differences in accuracy of beliefs. The second essay studies the effects of trade costs in goods market on international comovements of equity markets and those on equity home bias. This essay develops a continuous-time general equilibrium model in a two-country, two-asset, and two-good setting where international trade of goods is costly. I solve for the optimal portfolios and the equilibrium correlations of cross-country equity returns and analyze how they change depending on the size of trade costs, the coeiffcient of risk aversion, and the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. It is found that the cross-country equity return correlations decrease with the size of trade costs. This result is robust to different sizes of trade costs and asymmetry related to potential growth and consumer preferences. It is also found that the size of the trade costs and other parameter values determine whether trade costs would generate equity home bias or foreign bias. The third essay is devoted to an empirical analysis of the effects of financial integration on international comovements of financial markets. The essay provides a characterization of synchronization among 24 countries over the period 1980-2003. A country-pair panel instrumental variables framework is employed to explain time-varying bilateral correlations among national stock returns, by utilizing the dataset on trade costs in Fitzgerald (2008). It is found that finnancial integration driven by reduction of trade costs leads to a higher degree of synchromization across stock markets.

Download or read book Global Analysis of Dynamic Models in Economics and Finance written by Gian Italo Bischi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this special volume survey some of the most recent advances in the global analysis of dynamic models for economics, finance and the social sciences. They deal in particular with a range of topics from mathematical methods as well as numerous applications including recent developments on asset pricing, heterogeneous beliefs, global bifurcations in complementarity games, international subsidy games and issues in economic geography. A number of stochastic dynamic models are also analysed. The book is a collection of essays in honour of the 60th birthday of Laura Gardini.​

Download or read book Three Essays in Macroeconomics and Finance written by Yang Li and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 develops a continuous-time, heterogeneous agents version of the Barro-Rietz rare disasters model. Following Gabaix (2012), the disaster probability is assumed to be time-varying. The economy consists of two types of agents: (1) a "rational" agent, who updates his beliefs using Bayes Rule, and (2) a "robust" agent, who updates his beliefs using a pessimistically distorted prior. Following Hansen and Sargent (2008), pessimism is disciplined using detection error probabilities. Disaster risk is assumed to be nontradeable. The model is calibrated to US data, and focuses on three disaster episodes: (1) The Great Depression of 1929-33, (2) The Financial Crisis of 2008-09, and (3) The Covid Pandemic of 2020. The key contribution of the paper is to show that the model can replicate the observed spike in trading volume that occurs during disasters. Trading produces endogenous low frequency dynamics in the distribution of wealth. The relative wealth of robust agents gradually declines during normal times, but rises sharply during disasters. These results sound a note of caution when interpreting short-run movements in the distribution of wealth. Chapter 2 examines the market selection hypothesis in a continuous time asset pricing model with jumps. It is shown that the hypothesis is valid when agents have log preferences. The result is robust as it does not depend on whether markets are incomplete. Jumps affect long-run wealth dynamics through a redistribution channel: Disasters lead to large wealth redistribution as agents with heterogeneous beliefs about disasters have different exposures to risky assets. Using tools from ergodic theory, I prove a novel result that generalizes the rationality concept in the existing literature: an agent endowed with the optimal filter will outperform other agents in complete financial markets asymptotically. Chapter 3, a joint paper with Xiaowen Lei, develops a continuous-time overlapping generations model with rare disasters and agents who learn from their own experiences. Using microdata about household finance in China, we establish that economic disasters such as the Great Leap Forward make investors distrustful of the market. Generations that experience disasters invest a lower fraction of their wealth in risky assets, even if similar disasters are not likely to occur again during their lifetimes. "Fearing to attempt" therefore inhibits wealth accumulation by these "depression babies" relative to other generations.

Download or read book Essays in Dynamic General Equilibrium written by Dân Vuʺ Cao and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters studying dynamic economies in general equilibrium. The first chapter considers an economy in business cycles with potentially imperfect financial markets. The second chapter investigates an economy in its balanced growth path with heterogeneous firms. The third chapter analyzes dynamic competitions that these firms are potentially engaged in. The first chapter, "Asset Price and Real Investment Volatility with Heterogeneous Beliefs," sheds light on the role of imperfect financial markets on the economic and financial crisis 2007-2008. This crisis highlights the role of financial markets in allowing economic agents, including prominent banks, to speculate on the future returns of different financial assets, such as mortgage-backed securities. I introduce a dynamic general equilibrium model with aggregate shocks, potentially incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents to investigate this role of financial markets. In addition to their risk aversion and endowments, agents differ in their beliefs about the future aggregate states of the economy. The difference in beliefs induces them to take large bets under frictionless complete financial markets, which enable agents to leverage their future wealth. Consequently, as hypothesized by Friedman (1953), under complete markets, agents with incorrect beliefs will eventually be driven out of the markets. In this case, they also have no influence on asset prices and real investment in the long run. In contrast, I show that under incomplete markets generated by collateral constraints, agents with heterogeneous (potentially incorrect) beliefs survive in the long run and their speculative activities drive up asset price volatility and real investment volatility permanently. I also show that collateral constraints are always binding even if the supply of collateralizable assets endogenously responds to their price. I use this framework to study the effects of different types of regulations and the distribution of endowments on leverage, asset price volatility and investment. Lastly, the analytical tools developed in this framework enable me to prove the existence of the recursive equilibrium in Krusell and Smith (1998) with a finite number of types. This has been an open question in the literature. The second chapter, "Innovation from Incumbents and Entrants," is a joint work with Daron Acemoglu. We propose a simple modification of the basic Schumpeterian endogenous growth models, by allowing incumbents to undertake innovations to improve their products. This model provides a tractable framework for a simultaneous analysis of entry of new firms and the expansion of existing firms, as well as the decomposition of productivity growth between continuing establishments and new entrants. One lesson we learn from this analysis is that, unlike in the basic Schumpeterian models, taxes or entry barriers on potential entrants might increase economic growth. It is the outcome of the greater productivity improvements by incumbents in response to reduced entry, which outweighs the negative effect of the reduction in creative destruction. As the model features entry of new firms and expansion and exit of existing firms, it also generates an equilibrium firm size distribution. We show that the stationary firm size distribution is Pareto with an exponent approximately equal to one (the so-called "Zipf distribution"). The third chapter, "Racing: when should we handicap the advantaged competitor?" studies dynamic competitions, for example R & D competitions used in the second chapters. Two competitors with different abilities engage in a winner-take-all race; should we handicap the advantaged competitor in order to reduce the expected completion time of the race? I show that if the discouragement effect is strong, i.e., both competitors are discouraged from exerting effort when it becomes more certain who will win the race, we should handicap the advantaged. We can handicap him either by reducing his ability or by offering him a lower reward if he wins. Doing so induces higher effort not only from the disadvantaged competitor because of his higher incentive from a higher chance of winning the race but also from the advantaged competitor because of their strategic interactions. Therefore, the expected completion time is strictly shortened. To prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibria (including symmetric and asymmetric equilibria) that leads to the conclusion, I use a boundary value problem formulation which is novel to the dynamic competition literature. In some cases, I obtain closed-form solutions of the equilibria.

Download or read book Essays on Financial Markets Inequality and Economic Development written by Joaquin Blaum and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chapter 1, I study the effects of wealth inequality on economies where financial markets are imperfect. I exploit the idea that inequality should have a different effect across sectors. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, I show that sectors that are more in need of external finance are relatively smaller in countries with higher income inequality. I then build a model in which sectors differ in their fixed cost requirement, agents face collateral constraints, and production is subject to decreasing returns. A calibrated version of the model is consistent with the documented facts on inequality and cross-sector outcomes. At the calibrated parameters, wealth inequality exacerbates the effect of financial frictions on the economy. Quantitatively, wealth inequality can generate losses of up to 46 percent of per capita income. In Chapter 2, co-authored with Claire Lelarge and Michael Peters, we explore the ingredients that a model of import behavior should have in order to be consistent with the firm level evidence. We build a model where firms are heterogeneous in their factor neutral productivity, and prices, fixed costs and input qualities are common across firms. Using a comprehensive dataset of French firms, we test the qualitative predictions of such model. The model fares well in describing firm's expenditure across imported varieties, but fails to account for the pattern of expenditure between domestic and foreign inputs. We conclude that a mechanism inducing firm-level heterogeneity in the relative price of domestic varieties is needed to model import demand. In Chapter 3, I study the effects of financial frictions on the pattern of cross-industry growth rates. I document two facts: (i) externally dependent sectors tend to grow faster along the economy's development path, and (ii) externally dependent sectors grow disproportionately faster in countries with better financial institutions. I argue that financial frictions can account for these facts. I build a dynamic two-sector model in which sectors differ in their liquidity requirement and agents face collateral constraints. Financial frictions generate faster growth in the sector with higher liquidity requirement. I identify conditions under which financial development leads to higher excess growth in the externally dependent sector.

Download or read book Three Essays in Finance and Macroeconomics written by Stavros Panageas and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter I investigate whether firms' physical investments react to the speculative over-pricing of their securities. I introduce investment considerations in an infinite horizon continuous time model with short sale constraints and heterogeneous beliefs along the lines of Scheinkman and Xiong (2003) and obtain closed form solutions for all quantities involved. I show that market based q and investment are increased, even though such investment is not warranted on the basis of long run value maximization. I use a simple episode to test the hypothesis that investment reacts to over-pricing. With publicly available data on short sales during the 1920's, I examine both the price reaction and the investment behavior of a number of companies that were introduced into the "loan crowd" during the first half of 1926. In line with Jones and Lamont (2002), I interpret this as evidence of overpricing due to speculation. I find that investment by these companies follows both the increase and the decline in "q" before and after the introduction, suggesting that companies in this sample reacted to security over-pricing. In the next chapter of the thesis (co-authored with E. Farhi) we study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors save for early retirement. We assume that agents can adjust their labor supply only through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We obtain closed form solutions and analyze the joint behavior of retirement time, portfolio choice, and consumption. In the final chapter of the thesis (co-authored with R. Caballero) we turn attention to hedging of sudden stops. We observe that even well managed emerging market economies are exposed to significant external risk, the bulk of which is financial. We focus on the optimal financial policy of such an economy under different imperfections and degrees of crowding out in its hedging opportunities.

Download or read book Essays in Financial Economics written by Joel M. Vanden and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Trading with Limited Capacity to Process Information written by Diego Vega San Martín and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In financial markets, investors with different limitations in their access and capacity to process information interact on a daily basis. This dissertation examines the impact of these limitations in explaining different phenomena that are observed in practice. First, I theoretically study the role of risk limits in risk management, and show how they not only help to alleviate the limitations of traders to correctly analyze the collected information, but also convey benefits in the provision of incentives. Second, I analyze the effect of changes in the credit rating of firms on the informativeness of their corresponding stock price when some investors can overreact to salient information, thus affecting overall incentives to acquire information. Third, I examine how heterogeneous beliefs about the ability of a firm's CEO between insiders and outside investors, and the varying quality of the information that is available to each of them, shape the compensation contract offered to the executive.

Download or read book Essays in Financial Economics written by Adem Dugalic and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores effects of trading frictions due to the over-the-counter nature of some financial markets on asset prices, trading activity, market structure and efficiency. The first chapter analyses how the introduction of post-trade transparency affected dealers' trading and market liquidity in the secondary U.S. corporate bond market. Using the TRACE dataset with a novel variable identifying different dealers in the market, I quantify dealers' centrality in the context of the trading network and estimate a differential response to the reform across dealers of different centrality. I show that the introduction of transparency reduced the estimated bid-ask spreads of peripheral dealers by about 24 basis points, while spreads of core dealers remained unaffected. The trading volume of high-yield bonds fell by 6.7% for core dealers and by an insignificant amount for peripheral dealers. There was no effect on dealers' capital commitment and inventory behavior. To rationalize these findings, I propose a dynamic model of trade with asymmetric information and search frictions that gives rise to endogenous heterogeneity in dealers' trading activity and explains the empirical evidence. Three mechanisms through which transparency may affect the market are outlined: marketwise reduction in adverse selection, higher demand for immediacy by informed traders, and interaction between liquidity and informed traders. Further effects of transparency and welfare implications in the context of the model are discussed. The second chapter is co-authored with Diego Torres Patino. We study how short sale constraints on the lending side of the market affect asset prices in an equilibrium model with multiple assets. We endow investors with heterogeneous beliefs in order to generate short selling demand. We obtain a CAPM-like equation that links asset-specific excess returns with the market equity premium. In the presence of short sale constraints in the market, the model gives rise to asset-specific alphas that are explained by both asset-specific and market-wide short sale constraints; unconstrained stocks have higher risk-adjusted expected returns relative to the market portfolio, whereas the opposite holds for constrained stocks. In the absence of short sale constraints, the model reduces to the standard CAPM. We test the model using extensive data on short interest and borrow fees. The model is able to empirically explain asset prices for 10 portfolios sorted by the degree to which they are short sale constrained, as opposed to the CAPM and factor models which produce unexplained alphas that are significantly different from zero for the portfolios consisting of highly constrained stocks. In the final chapter, I study financial intermediation in a model of entry and competition between an over-the-counter market and exchange. The over-the-counter market is characterized by search, bargaining and capacity to intermediate trade of securities customized to individual investors. The exchange can support trading of a subset of standardized securities at prices quoted to all investors. I compute explicitly asset prices and volume at each trading venue and analyze efficiency of the resulting market structure. Bargaining power of investors in the OTC market and cost associated with trading non-customized securities at the exchange have ambiguous effects on the relative volume across the trading venues. The market outcome is inefficient due to bargaining in the OTC market and imperfect competition of specialist at the exchange. The model is well suited for quantitative analysis provided sufficiently detailed trading data from both types of trading venues.

Download or read book Essays on Uncertainty Beliefs Updating and Portfolio Choice written by Kouamé Marius Sossou and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Thesis, consisting of three chapters, studies the effects of uncertainty on decision-making with portfolio choice applications. Chapter 1 studies how experimental subjects report subjective probability distributions in the presence of ambiguity characterized by uncertainty over a fixed set of possible probability distributions generating future outcomes. The level of distribution uncertainty varies according to the observed outcomes and the rules used by the subjects to update the distribution uncertainty. This chapter introduces several reporting and updating rules and our empirical analysis focuses on estimating the sample distribution of these rules. Two dominant reporting rules emerge from our analysis: we find that 65% of subjects report distributions by properly weighting the possible distributions using their expressed uncertainty, while 22% of subjects report distributions close to the distribution they perceive as most likely. Further, we find significant heterogeneity in how subjects update their expressed uncertainty. On average, subjects tend to overweight the importance of their prior uncertainty relative to new information, leading to ambiguity that is substantially more persistent than would be predicted using Bayes' rule. Counterfactual simulations suggest that this persistence will likely hold in settings not covered by our experiment. Uncertainty in financial markets is a natural consequence of investors being unaware of objective probabilities of asset returns. Chapter 2 highlights that ambiguity and loss aversion have opposite effects on financial markets and can coexist in the presence of uncertainty. This chapter addresses the normative question of the optimal portfolio evaluation frequency for an investor in order to minimize the effect of myopia, but to learn about the investment opportunities in the market. Towards this end, we present a new experimental design in which investors are asked to make repeated portfolio choices facing initial ambiguity concerning the distribution of returns of one of the available assets. We exploit exogenous variations in evaluation frequency along with time variation of probabilistic beliefs over the possible return distributions to jointly identify ambiguity, loss, and risk aversion along with rules investors use to update their ambiguity. Estimates from a structural model suggest seven different classes of investors. Investor class membership depends on loss aversion, ambiguity aversion as well as risk aversion preferences. Further, we find that at the aggregated level, investors are loss averse, ambiguity averse and they display risk aversion over gains and risk seeking over losses. We conclude our analysis by using our model estimates to predict the distribution of optimal evaluation periods for our sample. Our predictions suggest that approximatively 70% of investors prefer the highest possible evaluation period frequency. Finally, Chapter 3 investigates whether or not the discount factor of the elderly affects their portfolio choices. We estimate time preferences using inter-temporal choice data from a hypothetical experiment in a representative sample of American elders and a structural model of decision-making accounting for lifetime uncertainty. Our results indicate considerable heterogeneity in the elderly population. Moreover, we find that older people who display a higher discount factor are more likely to own retirement accounts and risky assets. These older people also tend to decrease the share of financial wealth held in safe assets and increase the share of financial wealth held in risky assets. These findings suggest that time preferences affect investment choices from safe assets toward other financial assets, all else being equal.

Download or read book Global Analysis of Dynamic Models in Economics and Finance written by Gian Italo Bischi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-08-04 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this special volume survey some of the most recent advances in the global analysis of dynamic models for economics, finance and the social sciences. They deal in particular with a range of topics from mathematical methods as well as numerous applications including recent developments on asset pricing, heterogeneous beliefs, global bifurcations in complementarity games, international subsidy games and issues in economic geography. A number of stochastic dynamic models are also analysed. The book is a collection of essays in honour of the 60th birthday of Laura Gardini.​

Download or read book Essays on Financial Markets and Trading Behavior written by Sahn-Wook Huh and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Role of Investor Beliefs in Financial Markets written by Tyrone William Callahan and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Theoretical and Empirical Studies in Financial Markets written by Xiandong Luo and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Handbook on Systemic Risk written by Jean-Pierre Fouque and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook on Systemic Risk, written by experts in the field, provides researchers with an introduction to the multifaceted aspects of systemic risks facing the global financial markets. The Handbook explores the multidisciplinary approaches to analyzing this risk, the data requirements for further research, and the recommendations being made to avert financial crisis. The Handbook is designed to encourage new researchers to investigate a topic with immense societal implications as well as to provide, for those already actively involved within their own academic discipline, an introduction to the research being undertaken in other disciplines. Each chapter in the Handbook will provide researchers with a superior introduction to the field and with references to more advanced research articles. It is the hope of the editors that this Handbook will stimulate greater interdisciplinary academic research on the critically important topic of systemic risk in the global financial markets.