Macroeconomics

A core puzzle in Önancial economics is the inability of standard risk-premium models to account for excess returns in currency and other asset markets.

The global financial crisis led to the rediscovery of ‘fundamental uncertainty’. Incorporating uncertainty into the analysis of financial markets alters our understanding of how these markets operate and expose the two-faced role of law in finance.

There is much anecdotal evidence in the popular media, backed up by survey research, that participants in currency markets pay close attention to fundamental economic variables in forming their forecasts of future exchange rates.

For macroeconomists, an individual is rational if she uses her understanding of the way the economy works in making decisions that do not conflict with her objectives.

The present-value model of stock prices is a workhorse in financial economics. The model relates today’s price of a stock (or a basket of stocks) to the market’s forecasts of next-period’s price and dividend, appropriately discounted.

In this paper, we examine one of the core puzzles in International Macroeconomics, the so-called “forward-discount anomaly.”

A core premise of contemporary economic models is that researchers can adequately specify in probabilistic terms how individuals alter the way they make decisions and how the processes underpinning market outcomes unfold over time.

The first part of this text comes back on the standard economic viewpoint on expectational coordination, a viewpoint that the recent events have challenged.

State and market are often depicted as distinct, even antagonistic. Markets appear as natural products of spontaneous ordering; states as leviathans that if left untamed will distort, if not destroy markets’ natural state.

Uncertainty is an unavoidable feature of economic life, although we may cope with it sometimes by ignoring it. Institutions, conventions and behaviour are all conditioned by uncertainty, and they in turn condition uncertainty in a reflexive manner.

In the first ten chapters of our book, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, we discuss banking and the economics of funding as it applies to banks.