In this paper we analyze transitions in the stock markets of the US, the UK, and Germany. For all this markets we find that while the markets were focused on stocks from the IT and technology sector around the year 2000, this focus has vanished and the markets have mostly moved towards a focus...

Recent calculations have suggested that the German federal government has saved roughly EUR 90-100 billion, cumulatively, due to low bond yields since the onset of the Euro crisis. In order to determine the contribution of the "flight to quality" to this sum, we define the flight to quality as a...

We examine the performance of volatility models that incorporate features such as long (short) memory, regime-switching and multifractality along with two competing distributional assumptions of the error component, i.e. Normal vs Student-t. Our precise contribution is twofold. First, we...

We use weekly survey data on short-term and medium-term sentiment of German investors in order to study the causal relationship between investors' mood and subsequent stock price changes. In contrast to extant literature for other countries, a tri-variate vector autoregression for short-run...

This article investigates the statistical and economic implications of adaptive forecasting of exchange rates with panel data and alternative predictors. The candidate exchange rate predictors are drawn from (i) macroeconomic ‘fundamentals’, (ii) return/volatility of asset markets and (iii)...

This paper proposes and tests a theory of credit-driven asset bubbles which are neutral in their real effects. When a lender such as a government, central bank, or banking sector is willing to lend infinitely against collateral, explosive asset bubbles can form which exactly offset a bubble in...

We study the well-known multiplicative Lognormal cascade process in which the multiplication of Gaussian and Lognormally distributed random variables yields time series with intermittent bursts of activity. Due to the non-stationarity of this process and the combinatorial nature of such a...

We analyze the stock prices of the S&P market from 1987 to 2012 with the covariance matrix of the firm returns determined in time windows of several years. The eigenvector belonging to the leading eigenvalue (market) exhibits in its long term time dependence a phase transition with an order...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

Maximum likelihood estimation of discretely observed diffusion processes is mostly hampered by the lack of a closed form solution of the transient density. It has recently been argued that a most generic remedy to this problem is the numerical solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck (FP) or...