This dissertation deals with the impact of speculative behaviour on output patterns of the real economy. The impact may be twofold. Speculative behaviour occurs due to positive developments at the real economy and optimistic outlooks. Also, speculative behaviour may occur at other markets, like...

Multi-agent, financial forecasting, neural networks, dynamical systems, market modeling, cognitive systems, econometrics. - One of the challenges of financial research is to develop models that are capable of explaining and forecasting market price movements and returns.Agent based models focus...

Mean reversion, volatility persistence, long memory, time scales, stochastic volatility, GARCH, spurious long memory. - I discuss mean reversion in the first and the second moment of the return distribution. After a discussion of the concepts and a summary of the findings in the literature, I...