As the introduction of financial transaction taxes is increasingly discussed by political leaders we explore possible consequences such taxes could have on markets. Here we examine how “stylized facts”, namely fat tails and volatility clustering, are affected by different tax regimes in...

The structural transformation of China – or the reallocation of resources from the agricultural sector to the nonagricultural sector – between 1978 and 2003 was truly remarkable. We develop a two-sector neoclassical growth model to quantitatively assess the driving forces of China's recent...

Chartist and fundamentalist models have proven to be capable of replicating stylized facts on speculative markets. In general, this is achieved by specifying nonlinear interactions of otherwise linear asset price expectations of the respective trader groups. This paper investigates whether or...

Although there are many models that yield a simple interpretation of the basic features of firm and industry evolution, they are too stylized to confront the micro-level data in a formal quantitative analysis. By introducing heterogeneity to a stylized industry evolution model, I explain several...

Fifty-two research interviews were conducted with money managers controlling over $500 billion. This paper presents detailed material from one interview to argue interviews usefully describe their shared reality and provide information about the conditions of action facing financial...

We illustrate that the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) could be the result of indeterminacy of equilibria. In a simple neoclassical growth model with a single environmental externality in households’ utility function and with public abatement, we characterize the condition...

With a large number of securities (N) and fewer observations (T), deriving the global minimum variance portfolio requires the inversion of the singular sample covariance matrix of security returns. We introduce the Break-Down Free Generalized Minimum RESidual (BFGMRES), a Krylov subspaces...

This paper presents an economic interpretation of the optimal “stopping” of perpetual project opportunities under both certainty and uncertainty. Prior to stopping, the expected rate of return from delay exceeds the rate of interest. The expected rate of return from delay is the sum of the...

We propose three residual-based tests for conditional asymmetry. The distribution is assumed to fall into the class of skewed distributions of Fernández and Steel (1998). In this class, asymmetry is measured by the ratio between the probabilities of being larger and smaller than the mode....

The purpose of this paper is to understand differences in cyclical phenomena across a broad range of developed and emerging countries based on the behavior of two key economic times series—industrial production and employment. The paper characterizes the series in question as a recurring...