China is the world's largest investor and greatest contributor to global economic growth by wide margins, and will remain so for many years. The efficiency of its financial system in allocating capital to investment will be important to sustain this growth. This paper shows that China's stock...

Volatility clustering and fat tails are prominently observed in financial markets. Here, we analyze the underlying mechanisms of three agent-based models explaining these stylized facts in terms of market instabilities and compare them on empirical grounds. To this end, we first develop a...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

Financial volatility obeys two fascinating empirical regularities that apply to various assets, on various markets, and on various time scales: it is fat-tailed (more precisely power-law distributed) and it tends to be clustered in time. Many interesting models have been proposed to account for...

The market for cryptocurrencies has experienced extremely turbulent conditions in recent times, and we can clearly identify strong bull and bear market phenomena over the past year. In this paper, we utilise algorithms for detecting turnings points to identify both bull and bear phases in...

This paper analyzes non-fundamental volatility and efficiency in a class of large games (including e.g. linear-quadratic beauty contests) that feature strategic interaction and endogenous information acquisition. We adopt the rational inattention approach to information acquisition but...

We re-examine the Fama (1984) puzzle – the finding that ex post depreciation and interest differentials are negatively correlated, contrary to what theory suggests – for eight advanced country exchange rates against the US dollar, over the period up to June 2019. The rejection of the joint...

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of the equity markets in the U.S. The implications of this development for financial markets are still unclear. The paper presents novel empirical evidence that ownership by large institutions predicts higher volatility and greater noise in...