No Arabic abstract
We introduce an agent-based model, in which agents set their prices to maximize profit. At steady state the market self-organizes into three groups: excess producers, consumers and balanced agents, with prices determined by their own resource level and a couple of macroscopic parameters that emerge naturally from the analysis, akin to mean-field parameters in statistical mechanics. When resources are scarce prices rise sharply below a turning point that marks the disappearance of excess producers. To compare the model with real empirical data, we study the relations between commodity prices and stock-to-use ratios of a range of commodities such as agricultural products and metals. By introducing an elasticity parameter to mitigate noise and long-term changes in commodities data, we confirm the trend of rising prices, provide evidence for turning points, and indicate yield points for less essential commodities.
This paper investigates whether security markets price the effect of social distancing on firms operations. We document that firms that are more resilient to social distancing significantly outperformed those with lower resilience during the COVID-19 outbreak, even after controlling for the standard risk factors. Similar cross-sectional return differentials already emerged before the COVID-19 crisis: the 2014-19 cumulative return differential between more and less resilient firms is of similar size as during the outbreak, suggesting growing awareness of pandemic risk well in advance of its materialization. Finally, we use stock option prices to infer the markets return expectations after the onset of the pandemic: even at a two-year horizon, stocks of more pandemic-resilient firms are expected to yield significantly lower returns than less resilient ones, reflecting their lower exposure to disaster risk. Hence, going forward, markets appear to price exposure to a new risk factor, namely, pandemic risk.
The aim of this study is to investigate quantitatively whether share prices deviated from company fundamentals in the stock market crash of 2008. For this purpose, we use a large database containing the balance sheets and share prices of 7,796 worldwide companies for the period 2004 through 2013. We develop a panel regression model using three financial indicators--dividends per share, cash flow per share, and book value per share--as explanatory variables for share price. We then estimate individual company fundamentals for each year by removing the time fixed effects from the two-way fixed effects model, which we identified as the best of the panel regression models. One merit of our model is that we are able to extract unobservable factors of company fundamentals by using the individual fixed effects. Based on these results, we analyze the market anomaly quantitatively using the divergence rate--the rate of the deviation of share price from a companys fundamentals. We find that share prices on average were overvalued in the period from 2005 to 2007, and were undervalued significantly in 2008, when the global financial crisis occurred. Share prices were equivalent to the fundamentals on average in the subsequent period. Our empirical results clearly demonstrate that the worldwide stock market fluctuated excessively in the time period before and just after the global financial crisis of 2008.
Standard approaches to the theory of financial markets are based on equilibrium and efficiency. Here we develop an alternative based on concepts and methods developed by biologists, in which the wealth invested in a financial strategy is like the abundance of a species. We study a toy model of a market consisting of value investors, trend followers and noise traders. We show that the average returns of strategies are strongly density dependent, i.e. they depend on the wealth invested in each strategy at any given time. In the absence of noise the market would slowly evolve toward an efficient equilibrium, but the statistical uncertainty in profitability (which is adjusted to match real markets) makes this noisy and uncertain. Even in the long term, the market spends extended periods of time away from perfect efficiency. We show how core concepts from ecology, such as the community matrix and food webs, give insight into market behavior. The wealth dynamics of the market ecology explain how market inefficiencies spontaneously occur and gives insight into the origins of excess price volatility and deviations of prices from fundamental values.
We consider the problem of designing a derivatives exchange aiming at addressing clients needs in terms of listed options and providing suitable liquidity. We proceed into two steps. First we use a quantization method to select the options that should be displayed by the exchange. Then, using a principal-agent approach, we design a make take fees contract between the exchange and the market maker. The role of this contract is to provide incentives to the market maker so that he offers small spreads for the whole range of listed options, hence attracting transactions and meeting the commercial requirements of the exchange.
Low inflation was once a welcome to both policy makers and the public. However, Japans experience during the 1990s changed the consensus view on price of economists and central banks around the world. Facing deflation and zero interest bound at the same time, Bank of Japan had difficulty in conducting effective monetary policy. It made Japans stagnation unusually prolonged. Too low inflation which annoys central banks today is translated into the Phillips curve puzzle. In the US and Japan, in the course of recovery from the Great Recession after the 2008 global financial crisis, the unemployment rate had steadily declined to the level which was commonly regarded as lower than the natural rate or NAIRU. And yet, inflation stayed low. In this paper, we consider a minimal model of dual labor market to explore what kind of change in the economy makes the Phillips curve flat. The level of bargaining power of workers, the elasticity of the supply of labor to wage in the secondary market, and the composition of the workforce are the main factors in explaining the flattening of the Phillips curve. We argue that the changes we consider in the model, in fact, has plausibly made the Phillips curve flat in recent years.