It is being increasingly held in the literature that, in a globalizing world, flexible exchange rates are no longer enough to insulate an economy against external shocks. Our empirical results corroborate the observation that, in the past few years, global factors have had a crucial impact on...

While some of the recent surge of oil prices can be attributed to robust global demand at a time of tight production capacities, commentators occasionally also blame the impact of speculators for part of the price pressure. We propose an empirical oil market model with heterogeneous speculators....

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...