This study investigates the role of heterogeneous agents in oil markets and tests tales of speculators in oil price formation. Results obtained from using a non-linear heterogeneous agent model suggest that oil market prices are driven by different groups of speculators, namely fundamentalists,...

This paper introduces a new information density indicator to provide a more comprehensive understanding of price reactions to news and, more specifically, to the sources of jumps in financial markets. Our information density indicator, which measures the abnormal amount of noisy “ticker”...

We analyze how the inclusion of several sectors in a portfolio leads to a countering of exposures and to a replication of the index. Using a weight-based measure, we find that on a composition level unintended indexing appears to happen with only moderate severity. However, co-movement with the...

This study addresses real estate's riskiness from a distributional viewpoint. Several studies have found real estate returns to be best modeled with stable paretian distributions. Using NCREIF individual property returns this is confirmed, but the first application of stable distributions to...

This paper uses regime-switching models of the threshold type to analyze the adjustment process of rental prices for three UK commercial real estate sectors over the period 1974 to 2008. The non-linear models outperform their linear counterparts in in-sample fit. Their out-of-sample forecasting...