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...

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...

In this paper we argue that in realistically calibrated two period general equilibrium models with incomplete markets CAPM-pricing provides a good benchmark for equilibrium prices even when agents are not mean-variance optimizers and returns are not normally distributed. We numerically...

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....

Abstract: We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when...

Abstract This paper selectively surveys some of the more prominent laboratory experimental studies on asset market behavior. The strands of literature considered are market microstructure, pari-mutuel betting markets, characteristics of participants, the effect of information release, and...

We report the results of an experiment designed to measure how well asset market prices track fundamentals when the latter experience peaks and troughs. We observe greater price efficiency in markets in which fundamentals rise to a peak and then decline, than in markets in which fundamentals...

Two important characteristics of current European equity markets are rooted in changes in financial regulation (the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive). The regulation (i) allows new trading venues to emerge, generating a fragmented market place and (ii) allows for a substantial fraction...

In this paper we propose a new rule to allocate risk capital to portfolios or divisions within a firm. Specifically, we determine the capital allocation that minimizes the excesses of sets of portfolios in lexicographical sense. The excess of a set of portfolios is defined as the expected loss...