Expectations play a crucial role in modern macroeconomic models. We consider a New Keynesian framework under rational expectations and under a behavioral model of expectation formation. We show how the economy behaves in the alternative scenarios with a focus on inflation volatility. Contrary to the rational model, the behavioral model predicts that inflation volatility can be lowered if the ce...

The general-to-specific (GETS) approach to modelling is widely employed in the modelling of economic series, but less so in financial volatility modelling due to computational complexity when many explanatory variables are involved. This study proposes a simple way of avoiding this problem and undertakes an out-of-sample forecast evaluation of the methodology applied to the modelling of weekly ...

Previous work by has shown that lumpy investment models well characterize individual expenditures on durables, in particular automobiles. In that class of models, a higher level of uncertainty generally implies that the household should tolerate a larger imbalance between the actual stock of the durable and the target stock before closing it by buying and/or selling. Then, if the level of uncer...

This paper investigates sudden changes in volatility in the stock markets of new European Union (EU) members by utilizing the iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithm. Using weekly data over the sample period 1994–2006, the time period of sudden change in variance of returns and the length of this variance shift are detected. A sudden change in volatility seems to arise from the evo...

Time series of financial asset values exhibit well known statistical features such as heavy tails and volatility clustering. We propose a nonparametric extension of the classical Peaks-Over-Threshold method from Extreme Value Theory to fit the time varying volatility in situations where the stationarity assumption may be violated by erratic changes of regime, say. As a result, we provide a meth...

We introduce habit formation in a model that studies the link between international trade in financial assets, economic growth, and welfare. As with time separable preferences asset trade increases the mean growth rate, but it also increases growth-volatility. We demonstrate that the welfare gain from asset trade is lower with habit persistence in consumption. This reflects that the habit-formi...

We provide a model of rational bubbles in a DNK framework. Entrepreneurs are heterogeneous in investment efficiency and face credit constraints. They can trade bubble assets to raise their net worth. The bubble assets command a liquidity premium and can have a positive value. Monetary policy affects the conditions for the existence of a bubble, its steady-state size, and its dynamics including ...

This research compares partial equilibrium and statistical time-series approaches to hedging. The finance literature stresses the former approach, while the applied economics literature has focused on the latter. We compare the out-of-sample hedging effectiveness of the two approaches when hedging commodity price risk using futures contracts. For various methods of parameter estimation and infe...

This paper derives semi-analytical pricing formulae for geometric average options (GAO) within a stochastic volatility framework. Assuming a general mean reverting process for the underlying asset and a square-root process for the volatility, the cross-moment generating function is derived and the cumulative probabilities are recovered using the Gauss-Laguerre quadrature rule. Fixed and floatin...

In this paper we provide empirical findings on the significance of positive feedback trading for the return behavior in the German stock market. Relying on the ShillerSentana-Wadhwani model, we use the link between index return auto-correlation and volatility to obtain a better understanding into the return characteristics generated by traders adhering to positive feedback trading strategies. O...