Traditional exchange rate models fail to explain stylized facts such as the high volatility or high trading volumes in an adequate way. Contemporary research has therefore increasingly turned to model the foreign exchange market in a more realistic setting, highlighting for instance the high...

We propose a simple Keynesian business cycle model in which national income expectations of heterogeneous interacting investors affect their investment decisions. The investors' expectation formation is influenced by their sentiment: investors who hold optimistic views about the future state of...

As demonstrated by Samuelson, the interplay between the multiplier analysis and the principle of acceleration may generate temporary business cycles. We extend Samuelson's seminal framework in the sense that investors now apply a nonlinear mix of extrapolative and regressive expectation...

We seek to demonstrate that consumer sentiment may create fluctuations in economic activity. Our nonlinear discrete-time model possesses, for instance, a Neimark-Sacker bifurcation, after which a stable steady state is replaced by (quasi-)periodic motion. Countercyclical interventions to...

We develop a simple two-region, cobweb-type dynamic partial equilibrium model to demonstrate the existence of optimal, possibly non-zero, trade barriers. A pure comparative statics analysis of our model suggests that a reduction of trade barriers, modeled as small but positive import tariffs,...

We present a simple financial market model with interacting chartists and fundamentalists. Since some speculators only become active when a certain misalignment level has been crossed, the model dynamics is driven by a discontinuous piecewise linear map. Recent mathematical techniques allow a...

Within the seminal cobweb model of Brock and Hommes, firms adapt their price expectations by a profit-based switching behavior between free näive expectations and costly rational expectations. Brock and Hommes demonstrate that fixed-point dynamics may turn into increasingly complex dynamics as...

We incorporate the behaviour of tax evasion into the standard two-dimensional Ising model and augment it by providing policy-makers with the opportunity to curb tax evasion via an appropriate enforcement mechanism. We find that tax evasion may vary greatly over time if no measures of control are...

We develop a simple financial market model with heterogeneous interacting speculators. The dynamics of our model is driven by a one-dimensional discontinuous piecewise linear map, having two discontinuity points and three linear branches. On the one hand, we study this map analytically and...