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For a firm financed by a mixture of collateralized (short-term) debt and uncollateralized (long-term) debt, we show that fluctuations in margin requirements, reflecting funding liquidity shocks, lead to increasing the firm’s default risk and credit spreads. The severity with which a firm is hit by increasing margin requirements highly depends on both its financing structure and debt maturity structure. Our results imply that an additional premium should be added when evaluating debt in order to account for rollover risks, especially for short-matured bonds. In terms of policy implications, our results strongly indicate that regulators should intervene fast to curtail margins in crisis periods and maintain a reasonably low margin level in order to effectively prevent creditors’ run on debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By incorporating behavioural sentiment in a model of a limit order market, we show that behavioural sentiment not only helps to replicate most of the stylized facts in limit order markets simultaneously, but it also plays a unique role in explaining those stylized facts that cannot be explained by noise trading, such as fat tails in the return distribution, long memory in the trading volume, an increasing and non-linear relationship between trade imbalance and mid-price returns, as well as the diagonal effect, or event clustering, in order submission types. The results show that behavioural sentiment is an important driving force behind many of the well-documented stylized facts in limit order markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a continuous-time model of exchange rates not only relying on macroeconomic factors but also having an investor heterogeneity component. The driving macroeconomic factor is the domestic–foreign interest rate differential, while the investor heterogeneity is described by the expectations of boundedly rational portfolio managers who use a weighted average of the expectations of fundamentalists and chartists. Within this framework, the different roles of the macroeconomic factor and investor heterogeneity in the determination of the exchange rate are examined explicitly. We show that this simple model generates very complicated market behaviour, including the existence of multiple steady-state equilibria, deviations of the market exchange rate from the fundamental one and market fluctuations. Numerical simulation of the corresponding stochastic version of the model shows that the model is able to generate typical time series and volatility clustering patterns observed in exchange rate markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is believed that diversity is good for our society, but is it good for financial markets? In particular, does the diversity with respect to beliefs among investors reduce the market risk of risky assets? The current paper aims to answer this question. Within the standard mean-variance framework, we introduce heterogeneous beliefs not only in risk preferences and expected payoffs but also in variances/covariances. By aggregating heterogeneous beliefs into a market consensus belief, we obtain capital asset pricing model-like equilibrium price and return relationships under heterogeneous beliefs. We show that the market aggregate behaviour is in principle a weighted average of heterogeneous individual behaviours. The impact of heterogeneity on the market equilibrium price and risk premium is examined in general. In particular, we give a positive answer to the question in the title by considering some special structure in heterogeneous beliefs. In addition, we provide an explanation of Miller's long-standing hypothesis on the relation between a stock's risk and the divergence of opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a contribution to the literature on the explanatory power and calibration of heterogeneous asset pricing models. We set out a new stochastic market-fraction asset pricing model of fundamentalists and trend followers under a market maker. Our model explains key features of financial market behaviour such as market dominance, convergence to the fundamental price and under- and over-reaction. We use the dynamics of the underlying deterministic system to characterize these features and statistical properties, including convergence of the limiting distribution and autocorrelation structure. We confirm these properties using Monte Carlo simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that simple price limiters may have unexpected consequences in irregular commodity price fluctuations between bull and bear markets and complicated impacts on the size of buffer stocks. In particular, imposing a lower price boundary may lead to a huge buffer stock, e.g. to a 'butter mountain' or a 'milk lake' and this is a real problem for regulators since storage costs may become impossible to finance over time. The relation between price limiters and the size of buffer stocks is nontrivial and there may exist some optimal price limiters which require only weak market interventions and thus provide a rather inexpensive option to regulate commodity markets. In this article, we use a simple commodity market model to explore the relation between price limiters and the average growth rate of the buffer stocks. It is found that these optimal price limiter levels are simply the minimum values of unstable periodic orbits of the underlying deterministic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]