We study in details the skew of stock option smiles, which is induced by the so-called leverage effect on the underlying -- i.e. the correlation between past returns and future square returns. This naturally explains the anomalous dependence of the skew as a function of maturity of the option....

We present a model that investigates the spontaneous emergence of randomness in equity market microstructure. The phase space analysis of our model exposes an endogenous source of fluctuation in price and volume. We formulate a control problem for maximizing price regularity and stability while...

Sales data in a commodity market (supermarket sales to consumers) has been analysed by studying the fluctuation spectrum and noise correlations. Three related products (ketchup, mayonnaise and curry sauce) have been analysed. Most noise in sales is caused by promotions, but here we focus on the...

Using the Minority Game model we study a broad spectrum of problems of market mechanism. We study the role of different types of agents: producers, speculators as well as noise traders. The central issue here is the information flow : producers feed in the information whereas speculators make it...

We consider a class of asset pricing models, where the risk-neutral joint process of log-price and its stochastic variance is an affine process in the sense of Duffie, Filipovic and Schachermayer [2003]. First we obtain conditions for the price process to be conservative and a martingale. Then...

The understanding of complex social or economic systems is an important scientific challenge. Here we present a comprehensive study of the Spanish Stock Exchange showing that most financial firms trading in that market are characterized by a resulting strategy and can be classified in groups of...

We model a closed economic system with interactions that generates the features of empirical wealth distribution across all wealth brackets, namely a Gibbsian trend in the lower and middle wealth range and a Pareto trend in the higher range, by simply limiting the an agents' interaction to only...

It is commonly believed that the correlations between stock returns increase in high volatility periods. We investigate how much of these correlations can be explained within a simple non-Gaussian one-factor description with time independent correlations. Using surrogate data with the true...

Typically, operational risk losses are reported above a threshold. Fitting data reported above a constant threshold is a well known and studied problem. However, in practice, the losses are scaled for business and other factors before the fitting and thus the threshold is varying across the...

The dynamics of prices in financial markets has been studied intensively both experimentally (data analysis) and theoretically (models). Nevertheless, a complete stochastic characterization of volatility is still lacking. What it is well known is that absolute returns have memory on a long time...