Early Warning Signs of Financial Market Turmoils

Nils Bertschinger and Oliver Pfante
Additional contact information
Nils Bertschinger: Systemic Risk Group, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany
Oliver Pfante: Systemic Risk Group, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany

JRFM, 2020, vol. 13, issue 12, 1-24

Abstract: Volatility clustering and fat tails are prominently observed in financial markets. Here, we analyze the underlying mechanisms of three agent-based models explaining these stylized facts in terms of market instabilities and compare them on empirical grounds. To this end, we first develop a general framework for detecting tail events in stock markets. In particular, we introduce Hawkes processes to automatically identify and date onsets of market turmoils which result in increased volatility. Second, we introduce three different indicators to predict those onsets. Each of the three indicators is derived from and tailored to one of the models, namely quantifying information content, critical slowing down or market risk perception. Finally, we apply our indicators to simulated and real market data. We find that all indicators reliably predict market events on simulated data and clearly distinguish the different models. In contrast, a systematic comparison on the stocks of the Forbes 500 companies shows a markedly lower performance. Overall, predicting the onset of market turmoils appears difficult, yet, over very short time horizons high or rising volatility exhibits some predictive power.

Keywords: volatility clustering; agent-based modeling; hawkes processes; early warning signs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C E F2 F3 G (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/13/12/301/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/13/12/301/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jjrfmx:v:13:y:2020:i:12:p:301-:d:453904

Access Statistics for this article

JRFM is currently edited by Ms. Chelthy Cheng

More articles in JRFM from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().