Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex evolutionary systems. Agents are boundedly rational and base their investment decisions upon market forecasting heuristics....

We empirically evaluate a behavioural model with boundedly rational traders who disagree about the persistence of deviations from the fundamental stock price. Fundamentalist traders believe in mean-reversion, while chartists extrapolate trends. Agents gradually switch between the two rules,...

We value rating-triggered step-up bonds with three methods: (i) the Jarrow, Lando andTurnbull (1997, JLT) framework, (ii) a similar framework using historical probabilities and(iii) as plain vanilla bonds. We find that the market seems to value single step-up bondsaccording to the JLT model,...

We investigate expectation formation in a controlled experimental en-vironment. Subjects are asked to predict the price in a standard asset pricingmodel. They do not have knowledge of the underlying market equilibrium equa-tions, but they know all past realized prices and their own predictions....

Taking a portfolio perspective on option pricing and hedging, we show that within the standard Black-Scholes-Merton framework large portfolios of options can be hedged without risk in discrete time. The nature of the hedge portfolio in the limit of large portfolio size is substantially different...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

The equity premium puzzle holds that the coefficient of relative risk aversion estimated from the consumption based CAPM under power utility is excessively high. Moreover, estimates in the literature vary considerably across countries. We gauge the uncertainty pertaining to the country risk...

The equity premium is a key parameter in asset allocation policies. There is a vigorous debate in the literature regarding the actual measurement of the equity premium, its size and the determinants of its variation. This study aims to take stock of this literature by means of a meta-analysis....

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

Empirical measures of world consumption growth risk have failed to rationalize the cross-section of country equity returns. We propose a new factor, termed "the global consumption factor", to explain the patterns in risk premiums on international equity markets. We identify this factor as the...