Fat tailed Probability Distributions: Applications in Asset Pricing and Financial Econometrics

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Economics, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Interests: asset pricing; business cycles; time series econometrics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is now widely established, since the seminal work of Mandelbrot (1963) that, financial time series, such as commodity prices and prices of company stocks, are better described by probability distributions that exhibit fat tails. In particular, modeling these time series with such distributions is superior to modeling with the much more commonly used Gaussian distributions.

The development of volatility models by Robert Engle (1982) sparked a debate in the literature on whether the fat tails, discovered by Mandelbrot (1963), were a consequence of volatility clustering exhibited by these models, e.g. see de Vries (1991). However, the ensuing literature has convincingly established the suitability of modeling financial time series with fat-tailed distributions, in addition to modeling their time-varying volatility through the AutoRegressive Conditionally Heteroskedastic (ARCH) class of models of Engle (1982), or its myriad variants, including stochastic volatility models.

Ignoring fat tails, when present, in models of financial time series leads to consequences for properties of estimators, such as incorrect standard errors, non-standard asymptotic distributions, and so forth. In applied work, this has consequences for myriad issues related to modeling financial series, such as testing for predictability of stock prices, measurements of value-at-risk, measurements of implied volatility, options prices, to name a few; e.g. see Fama (1992) and McCulloch (1996).

This Special Issue entitled, “Fat-tailed Probability Distributions: Applications in Asset Pricing and Financial Econometrics” aims to publish high-quality current research at the forefront of this area. It has been a while since Dufour et al (2010) edited a special volume devoted to a somewhat similar endeavor.

Sincerely yours,

Prasad V. Bidarkota
Guest Editor

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References

De Vries, C. (1991), On the Relation between GARCH and Stable Processes, Journal of Econometrics 48, p. 313‐324.
Dufour, J‐M. et al (2010), Heavy Tails and Paretian Distributions in Empirical Finance. A Volume Honoring Benoît Mandelbrot, Journal of Empirical Finance, Vol. 17, No. 2, p. 177‐282.
Engle, R.F. (1982), Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity with estimates of the variance of United Kingdom inflation, Econometrica, Vol. 50, No. 4, p. 987-1007.
Fama, E. F. (1992), Efficient Capital Markets: II, The Journal of Finance, Vol. XLVI, No. 5, p. 1575‐1617.
Mandelbrot, B. (1963), The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices, The Journal of Business, Vol. 36, No. 4, p. 394‐419.
McCulloch, J. H. (1996), Financial Applications of Stable Distributions, Handbook of Statistics 14, p. 393‐425.

Keywords

  • Fat-tailed Probability Distributions
  • Financial Time Series
  • Statistical / Econometric Modeling
  • Applications in Finance / Business / Macroeconomics

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 358 KiB  
Article
Heavy Metals: Might as Well Jump
by Neil A. Wilmot
Int. J. Financial Stud. 2019, 7(2), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijfs7020033 - 17 Jun 2019
Viewed by 2699
Abstract
Financial times series, and commodity prices in particular, are known to exhibit fat tails in the distribution of prices. As with many natural resources price series, the arrival of new information can lead to unexpectedly rapid changes—or jump—in prices. This suggests that natural [...] Read more.
Financial times series, and commodity prices in particular, are known to exhibit fat tails in the distribution of prices. As with many natural resources price series, the arrival of new information can lead to unexpectedly rapid changes—or jump—in prices. This suggests that natural resource commodity prices should follow a more complex process than geometric Brownian motion (GBM), which is linked to the Gaussian distribution. The presence of jumps (discontinuities) in several heavy metal price series is investigated, as well as time-varying volatility. The results demonstrate that allowing for jumps and time-varying volatility provides statistically important improvements in the modelling or prices, relative to GBM. These complex processes contributed to the fatness of the tails in the distribution of heavy metal price returns. Full article
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