Real and financial interacting markets: A behavioral macro-model

In the present paper we propose a model in which the real side of the economy, described via a Keynesian good market approach, interacts with the stock market with heterogeneous speculators, i.e., optimistic and pessimistic fundamentalists, that respectively overestimate and underestimate the reference value due to a belief bias. Agents may switch between optimism and pessimism according to which behavior is more profitable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first contribution considering both real and financial interacting markets and an evolutionary selection process for which an analytical study is performed. Indeed, employing analytical and numerical tools, we detect the mechanisms and the channels through which the stability of the isolated real and financial sectors leads to instability for the two interacting markets. In order to perform such analysis, we introduce the “interaction degree approach”, which allows us to study the complete three-dimensional system by decomposing it into two subsystems, i.e., the isolated financial and real markets, easier to analyze, that are then linked through a parameter describing the interaction degree between the two markets. We derive the stability conditions both for the isolated markets and for the whole system with interacting markets. Next, we show how to apply the interaction degree approach to our model. Among the various scenarios we are led to analyze, the most interesting one is that in which the isolated markets are stable, but their interaction is destabilizing. We choose such setting to give an economic interpretation of the model and to explain the rationale for the emergence of boom and bust cycles. Finally, we add stochastic noises to the optimists and pessimists demands and show how the model is able to reproduce the stylized facts for the real output data in the US.