Financial markets are typically characterized by high (low) price level and low (high) volatility during boom (bust) periods, suggesting that price and volatility tend to move together with different market conditions/states. By proposing a simple heterogeneous agent model of fundamentalists and...

The no-arbitrage affine Gaussian term structure model is used to analyse the impact of macroeconomic surprises on the nominal and the real term structure in the euro area and in the United States. We find that nominal rates are affected by surprises in economic growth, the labour market and the...

Estimates of the real term structure for the euro area implied by French index-linked bonds are obtained by means of a smoothing spline methodology. The real term structure allows computation of the constant-maturity inflation compensation, which is compared with the surveyed inflation...

This paper uses the celebrated no-arbitrage affine Gaussian term structure model applied to index-linked and standard government bonds to derive expected inflation rates and inflation risk premia, in the euro area and in the US. Maximum likelihood estimates show that the model describes the...

What kind of information do stock prices offer for predicting velocity? This paper develops previous work by Milton Friedman for the US economy and shows that a wealth effect derived from the stock market has negatively influenced the ratio of nominal income to a broad definition of money in a...

In the years following the publication of Black and Scholes [7], numerous alternative models have been proposed for pricing and hedging equity derivatives. Prominent examples include stochastic volatility models, jump diffusion models, and models based on Levy processes. These all have their own...

This paper studies the effect of correlation in the retional beliefs of agents on the volatility of asset prices.

We examine the equity premium pizzle with the prespective of the theory of Rational Beliefs Equilibrium (RBE) and show that from the perspective of this theory there is no puzzle.

We empirically analyse the returns of both Italian and round-trip open-end funds managed by Italian asset management companies (SGRs) in the period 2003-2008. Taking into account a modified version of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), we estimated a performance measure for each asset...

The paper discusses the problem of hedging not perfectly replicable contingent claims by using a benchmark, the numerraire portfolio, as reference unit. The proposed concept of benchmarked risk minimization generalizes classical risk minimization, pioneered by Follmer, Sondermann and Schweizer....