This introductory text is devoted to exposing the underlying nature of price formation in financial markets as a predominantly sociological phenomenon that relates individual decision-making to emergent and co-evolving social and financial structures. Two different levels of this sociological...

Long-term trends of financial markets are considered as a growth phenomenon, with a steady influx of money needed to ensure a sustainable growth. A study is made of the impact of money supply, dividends and interest rates, on the growth of a market. A method to estimate the level of investment...

We use agent-based models to study the competition among investors who use trading strategies with different amount of information and with different time scales. We find that mixing agents that trade on the same time scale but with different amount of information has a stabilizing impact on the...

It is suggested to consider long term trends of financial markets as a growth phenomenon. The question is what conditions are needed for a long term sustainable growth or contraction in a financial market? The paper discusses the role of traditional market players of long only mutual funds...

This study investigates whether domestic managers and their foreign counterparts differ in terms of return patterns over time, and where such difference originates. Reasons of financial sophistication of mutual fund markets lead to the assumption that money managers may behave differently from...

type="main" xml:id="obes12052-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>In this article, we try to realize the best compromise between in-sample goodness of fit and out-of-sample predictability of sovereign defaults. To do this, we use a new regression-tree based approach that signals impending sovereign debt crises...</p>

Based on a Bayesian time-varying beta model, we explore how the systematic risk exposures of hedge funds vary over time conditional on some exogenous variables that managers are assumed to use in changing their trading strategies. Using data from CSFB/Tremont indices over the period January...

In this paper, we realise an early warning system for hedge funds based on specific red flags that help detect the symptoms of impending extreme negative returns and the contagion effect. To do this we use regression tree analysis to identify a series of splitting rules that act as risk signals....