Jump tails,extreme dependencies,and the distribution of stock returns

We provide a new framework for estimating the systematic and idiosyncratic jump tail risks in financial asset prices. Our estimates are based on in-fill asymptotics for directly identifying the jumps, together with Extreme Value Theory (EVT) approximations and methods-of-moments for assessing the tail decay parameters and tail dependencies. On implementing the procedures with a panel of intraday prices for a large cross-section of individual stocks and the S&P 500 market portfolio, we find that the distributions of the systematic and idiosyncratic jumps are both generally heavy-tailed and close to symmetric, and show how the jump tail dependencies deduced from the high-frequency data together with the day-to-day variation in the diffusive volatility account for the “extreme” joint dependencies observed at the daily level.     

James M. Buchanan’s contractarianism and modern liberalism

This paper contrasts Buchanan’s contractarian–constitutional liberalism with Hayek’s evolutionary liberalism and Rothbards free-market liberalism as representative branches of the classical liberal tradition. While Hayek and Rothbard focus on individual liberty as private autonomy, Buchanan posits that individual sovereignty should be recognized as the fundamental normative premise of liberalism. He insists that a consistent application of this premise requires liberals to respect individuals as sovereigns not only in their capacity as private law subjects but also at the constitutional level of choice where, as sovereign citizens, they choose, jointly with their fellow citizens, the rules under which they wish to live. It is argued that by supplementing the notion of individual liberty as private autonomy with the concept of individual sovereignty in constitutional matters Buchanan lays the theoretical foundation for complementing the well-developed liberal theory of the market with a consistent liberal theory of democracy.     

Liberal constitutionalism,constitutional liberalism and democracy

The tension that is often seen to exist between the ideals of liberalism and of democracy is examined in this paper in light of the distinction between two liberal outlooks at constitutional regimes, namely, on the one side, a liberal constitutionalism that focuses on the need to provide institutional safeguards of individual liberty as private autonomy and, on the other hand, a constitutional liberalism that focuses on the need to respect the freedom of individuals to choose the constitutional environment in which they wish to live. It is argued that a liberalism that consistently extends its fundamental ideal of individual sovereignty to the level of constitutional choice can be reconciled with the basic democratic ideal of citizen sovereignty.     

Institutional Evolution through Purposeful Selection: The Constitutional Economics of John R. Commons

The paper relates John. R. Commons view on the roleof human design in institutional evolution to the views thathave been advanced on this matter by F. A. Hayek, in German ordo-liberalism,and in constitutional political economy. It is argued that Commonsconcept of purposeful selection points in the direction ofa theoretical perspective that consistently integrates the notionsof institutional evolution and constitutional design.     

Investigation of institutional changes in the UK housing market using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models

This paper investigates the effects of institutional changes within the UK housing market in recent decades using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models. This approach is motivated by models of institutional change drawn from the political science literature which focus on the existence of both fast-moving and slow-moving institutional changes and the interactions between them as drivers of the dynamics of asset prices. As a methodological contribution, we use several time-varying parameter models for the first time in investigations of institutional change. Our findings support the existence of both structural breaks and continuous variance in parameters. This contributes to our understanding of the housing market in two respects. Firstly, the dates of structural breaks appear to better match unexpected market shocks rather than remarkable political events, and this supports prior institutional theory. Secondly, assessment of the effect of slow-moving institutional changes shows that people’s biased expectations rather than the economic fundamentals have increasingly played an important role in driving housing prices in the short run although fundamentals continue to drive house prices to converge to their long-run equilibrium.     

Bitcoin fluctuations and the frequency of price overreactions

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management - This paper investigates the role of the frequency of price overreactions in the cryptocurrency market in the case of BitCoin over the period...     

Consumer understanding of food labels: toward a generic tool for identifying the average consumer

The ‘average consumer’ is referred to as a standard in regulatory contexts when attempts are made to benchmark how consumers are expected to reason while decoding food labels. An attempt is made to operationalize this hypothetical ‘average consumer’ by proposing a tool for measuring the level of informedness of an individual consumer against the national median at any time. Informedness, i.e. the individual consumer's ability to interpret correctly the meaning of the words and signs on a food label is isolated as one essential dimension for dividing consumers into three groups: less-informed, informed, and highly informed consumers. Consumer informedness is assessed using a 60-question test related to information found on a variety of Danish everyday food products and divided into factual questions and informedness about signpost labels. A test was made with 407 respondents who participated in four independent studies on fairness in consumer communication, and the average score for all was 57.6% of correct answers. A score of 64% and beyond would place a consumer in the upper quartile (the group of highly informed consumers), whereas a score of 52% or below would place the individual in the lower quartile (the group of less-informed consumers). Female respondents performed better than males on label recognition, and those around 40 years of age irrespective of gender performed best on factual knowledge, whereas those aged around 30 performed best on label recognition. It is foreseen that independent future studies of consumer behavior and decision making in relation to food products in different contexts could benefit from this type of benchmarking tool.