This paper investigates the relationship between negative news in financial newspapers and stock markets in times of global crisis, such as the 2008/2009 period. We analyzed one year of front page banner headlines of three financial newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times,...

Have Italian mutual funds been able to generate “extra-return”? Were some of them able to persistently beat the competitors? In this paper we address these questions and provide a detailed and systematic performance and return persistence analysis of the Italian equity mutual funds. We show...

This work deals with multivariate stochastic volatility models, which account for a time-varying variance-covariance structure of the observable variables. We focus on a special class of models recently proposed in the literature and assume that the covariance matrix is a latent variable which...

In time series analysis, latent factors are often introduced to model the heterogeneous time evolution of the observed processes. The presence of unobserved components makes the maximum likelihood estimation method more difficult to apply. A Bayesian approach can sometimes be preferable since it...

The paper deals with the use of empirical data in social science agent-based models. Agent-based models are too often viewed just as highly abstract thought experiments conducted in artificial worlds, in which the purpose is to generate and not to test theoretical hypotheses in an empirical way....

This paper investigates the relevance of reputation to improve the explorative capabilities of agents in uncertain environments. We have presented a laboratory experiment where sixty-four subjects were asked to take iterated economic investment decisions. An agent-based model based on their...