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This chapter considers an alternative approach to economic analysis, Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE), and introduces a model of asset prices and risk that has explicit mathematical microfoundations and yet remains open to nonroutine change. The IKE model consists of representations of individuals' preferences, forecasting behavior, constraints, and decision rules in terms of a set of causal (often called “informational”) variables, which portray the influence of economic policy, institutions, and other features of the social context. It also entails an aggregation rule and processes for the informational variables. The chapter examines irregular swings in asset prices and their relationship to financial risk. It also presents an IKE account of asset price swings before concluding with an analysis of contingent predictions of long swings and their compatibility with rationality.

This chapter discusses the basic determinants of the generation of wealth and its distribution across households; it has four sections. Section 7.1 considers the life cycle motive as a basis of household saving behaviour, paying particular attention to the role played by the pension annuity system. Section 7.2 discusses the role of education in transmitting wealth between parents and children. Section 7.3 turns to the topic of macroeconomics and looks at how the rate of return is determined in the long term, thereby showing how the theoretical discussions in this book form a general equilibrium framework. Section 7.4 takes up the question of asset and related expectations––asset price fluctuation is considered one of the major causes of generation of huge wealth in the short term, but there are various conflicting dimensions to this problem.

In order to describe the path followed by major macroeconomic variable around the time of crises, this chapter examines some dynamic models. It thus shows how the dynamic adjustment path of the economy associated with exchange rate based stabilization plan can be linked to currency crisis. How expected changes in future government's policies can affect the timing of attacks. How a run on central bank's foreign reserves can emerge in a context of consistent and flexible policy rules. How policymakers can elude speculative attacks by introducing uncertainty into the speculators' decisions. That the domestic currency often stays overvalued for a long period. That large discrete devaluations occur after the peg is abandoned. That the domestic interest rates tend to rise in the run up to the crisis. That speculative runs often occur in a multi-period context giving rise to alternating phases of “tranquillity” and “distress”. That asset price dynamics plays a critical role in triggering a full-blown financial crisis.

This chapter focuses on heterogeneous gain learning and long swings in asset prices. Many asset prices deviate from their fundamental values, yielding potential long-run predictability. Asset price swings can be both short or long in duration, and their time series shows few regular patterns when one analyzes their long-range behavior. This chapter considers an underparameterized learning model with heterogeneous gain parameters and traders using differing perspectives on history. It first provides an overview of the basic model and some benchmark simulation runs before discussing the output of the model compared to actual financial time series. It then describes a range of internal mechanisms of the agents and forecasts in use and how wealth moves across them over time. It shows that learning algorithms appear to be behaving in a predictable fashion, and that interesting dynamics come from how agent wealth selects rules over time. The chapter concludes by addressing some questions for researchers working on learning in financial markets.

This chapter presents a simple introduction to asset pricing in over-the-counter markets. Investors search for opportunities to trade and bargain with counterparties, each counterparty being aware that failure to conduct a trade could lead to a costly new search for a counterparty. In equilibrium, whenever there is gain from trade, the opportunity to search for a new counterparty is dominated by trading at the equilibrium asset price. The asset price reflects the degree of search frictions. Under conditions, illiquidity premia are higher when counterparties are harder to find, when sellers have less bargaining power, when the fraction of qualified owners is smaller, and when risk aversion, volatility, or hedging demand is larger. Supply shocks cause prices to jump, and then “recover” over time, with a pattern that depends on the degree of search frictions. The chapter shows how the equilibrium bargaining powers of the counterparties are determined by search opportunities using the approach of Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1985).

Ch. 2 first exposes the reader to a more tractable notion of common knowledge and the intuition behind proofs of the different no‐trade theorems. The no‐trade theorems state the specific conditions under which differences in information alone do not lead to trade. The next section sketches out a brief introduction of the basics of asset pricing under symmetric information and highlights the complications that can arise under asymmetric information. Information revelation by prices is closely linked to the security structure and market completeness. The chapter also provides definitions of bubbles and investigates the existence of bubbles under common knowledge. It then illustrates the importance of higher‐order uncertainty for the possible existence of bubbles.

This introductory chapter discusses the papers presented at the Center on Capitalism and Society conference held in the fall of 2010. The conference, which commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Phelps microfoundations volume, featured researchers engaged in developing alternatives to the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH). The Phelps volume provided radically new accounts of the comovements of macroeconomic aggregates, including inflation and unemployment, while casting serious doubt on the validity of policy analysis based on then-popular Keynesian macroeconometric models. This chapter considers the various efforts to reinvent macroeconomics that were discussed at the Phelps conference, with a particular focus on non-REH alternatives and their implications for economic analysis. Topics include nonroutine change and imperfect knowledge, expectational coordination and market volatility, autonomous expectations in long swings in asset prices, and the natural rate of unemployment.

This chapter discusses some of the topics the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee has spent a lot of time on. It first examines the rapid rise in household debt and its implications for monetary policy. The next section looks at the role of asset prices in monetary policy, with particular reference to the recent UK housing boom. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of the switch in the inflation target at the end of 2003.

Drawing on Chs. 4 and 5 (which discuss the supply and demand for securities separately), this chapter investigates whether economics has anything helpful to say about the prices of shares and related securities by reviewing the most important ideas suggested by economic theory in this area and assessing their usefulness in the real world. In the first two sections, two fairly ancient but still popular models of equity (share) prices are examined, one of which (the steady growth model) views shares as claims to future dividends and the other (the asset model) views them as claims to the underlying net assets (corporate net worth). For the most part, these models look at the shares of individual companies in isolation, not at the market as a whole, and that is their weakness, but the asset model in particular provides important insights into aggregate equity values; as an aside to this discussion it is shown that aggregate dividends have the intriguing feature of being an approximately constant percentage of national income, which means that corporate equities offer protection (though not perfect protection) against inflation as well as participation in the real growth of the economy. The third section looks at the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) – a discovery of the 1960s that, by considering equities in relation to each other, provided important new insights into the relation between risk and return. A more recent alternative approach known as Arbitrage Pricing Theory is discussed next, and finally there is a section (an appendix) on stock indexes.

This chapter examines the long swings of employment, investment, and asset prices. It highlights one stylized fact that a model of the natural rate of unemployment should be able to take into account: the relationship among unemployment, investment, and share prices that is observed in the data. Although this relationship is often ignored, it provides a justification for some recent models of the natural rate. The chapter first considers a moving natural rate of unemployment before discussing the relationship between the long swings of employment and asset price swings. It then introduces a stripped-down natural rate model that generates a relationship among the natural rate of unemployment, investment, and asset prices. It also describes how financial crises are linked to changes in asset prices, investment, and employment.

The pricing of fixed income securities follows the same general principles as the pricing of all other financial assets. This chapter explains some important general concepts and results in asset pricing theory that are applied in the rest of the book to the term structure of interest rate and the pricing of fixed income securities. The fundamental concepts discussed are arbitrage, state prices, risk-neutral probability measures, market prices of risk, market completeness, and representative agents. For the popular class of diffusion models, asset prices are shown to satisfy certain partial differential equations.

‘Option Pricing in a Single-Period Model’ uses the one-period complete markets model to derive forward prices of European-style options relates them to the forward price of the underlying asset. The authors show that the value of the option depends upon the shape of the pricing kernel, and, in particular, on the shape of the asset-specific pricing kernel, ψ(x_j). The analysis starts at a general level and then concentrates on an important special case, where the underlying cash flow is lognormal. They establish in this case that a risk-neutral valuation relationship (RNVR) exists between the option price and the price of the underlying asset if the asset-specific pricing kernel, ψ(x_j), has the property of constant elasticity. This establishes the well known Black–Scholes equation for the value of an option.

This chapter examines indeterminacies in wage and asset price expectations. It first considers what it argues are fatal flaws in Keynesian economics, comparing crude Keynesianism with a crude natural rate of unemployment. It then introduces a structuralist model of employment and economic growth that better illuminates the long slump without inflation in the United States. In a structuralist model, nonmonetary forces operate through structural channels to impact the path of employment and its medium-term level (as well as its long-term level). Asset prices, such as housing prices, are expressed in real terms. The chapter describes how structuralist models approaches issues relating to asset prices and wages and concludes by explaining how to think about expectation formation in modern economies—economies of the sort that became the lifetime subject of Frank H. Knight, John Maynard Keynes, and F. A. Hayek.

‘Asset Prices in a Single-period Model’ derives asset prices in a one-period model. The authors derive a version of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) using a complete market, state-contingent claims approach. They define the forward pricing kernel and then use the assumption of joint normality of the cash flows and Stein's lemma to establish the CAPM. They then derive the pricing kernel in an equilibrium representative investor model.

Several factors complicate the tasks of valuing assets in a portfolio and measuring their risk-adjusted performance in an international setting. Chief among these are currency and inflation effects that arise when investment returns must be translated into a currency other than that in which the return is paid. These complications affect both return and risk and, thus, value. This chapter provides a review of international asset pricing models and their risk-return structure, beginning with the basic international mean-variance model. The discussion then turns to the many mean-variance model extensions, including consumption-based models, models with higher-order statistical moments, and models using conditioning information. The chapter then reviews models based on arbitrage pricing principles or other multifactor approaches that differ from the mean-variance framework. The chapter concludes that more than one model type can be effective in an international setting, but that simplifications that detract from capturing international sources of risk should be avoided.

This chapter concludes the book and discusses some hotly debated issues in crises prevention, with special emphasis on the role of assets prices movements and the optimal choice of an exchange rate regime.

This chapter examines the central ideas about learning and bounded rationality for macroeconomics and finance. It first introduces the main methodological issues concerning expectation formation and learning before discussing the circumstances in which rational expectations may arise. It then reviews empirical work that applies learning to macroeconomic issues and asset prices, along with the implications of the use of structural knowledge in learning and the form of the agents' decision rules. As an application, the scope of Ricardian Equivalence is considered. The chapter also presents three applications of the learning approach to monetary policy: the appropriate specification of interest rate rules; implementation of price-level targeting to achieve learning stability of the optimal rational expectations equilibrium; and whether under learning, commitment to price-level targeting can be sufficient to rule out the deflation trap of a zero interest rate lower bound and return the economy to the intended rational expectations steady state.