IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this article

Can a stochastic cusp catastrophe model explain stock market crashes?

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Barunik, J.
  • Vosvrda, M.

Abstract

This paper is the first attempt to fit a stochastic cusp catastrophe model to stock market data. We show that the cusp catastrophe model explains the crash of stock exchanges much better than other models. Using the data of U.S. stock markets we demonstrate that the crash of October 19, 1987, may be better explained by cusp catastrophe theory, which is not true for the crash of September 11, 2001. With the help of sentiment measures, such as the index put/call options ratio and trading volume (the former models the chartists, the latter the fundamentalists), we have found that the 1987 returns are bimodal, and the cusp catastrophe model fits these data better than alternative models. Therefore we may say that the crash has been led by internal forces. However, the causes for the crash of 2001 are external, which is also evident in much weaker presence of bifurcations in the data. In this case, alternative models explain the crash of stock exchanges better than the cusp catastrophe model.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165-1889(09)00101-8
Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.

Volume (Year): 33 (2009)
Issue (Month): 10 (October)
Pages: 1824-1836

as
in new window

Handle: RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:33:y:2009:i:10:p:1824-1836
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jedc

Keywords: Stochastic cusp catastrophe Bifurcations Singularity Nonlinear dynamics Stock market crash;

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as
in new window


  1. Brock, William A. & Hommes, Cars H., 1998. "Heterogeneous beliefs and routes to chaos in a simple asset pricing model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 22(8-9), pages 1235-1274, August.
  2. Evstigneev, Igor & Taksar, Michael, 2009. "Dynamic interaction models of economic equilibrium," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 166-182, January.
  3. Day, Richard H. & Huang, Weihong, 1990. "Bulls, bears and market sheep," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 14(3), pages 299-329, December.
  4. Mark A. Carlson, 2006. "A brief history of the 1987 stock market crash with a discussion of the Federal Reserve response," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-13, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  5. Gennotte, Gerard & Leland, Hayne, 1990. "Market Liquidity, Hedging, and Crashes," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(5), pages 999-1021, December.
  6. Hołyst, Janusz A. & Kacperski, Krzysztof & Schweitzer, Frank, 2000. "Phase transitions in social impact models of opinion formation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 285(1), pages 199-210.
  7. Boswijk, H. Peter & Hommes, Cars H. & Manzan, Sebastiano, 2007. "Behavioral heterogeneity in stock prices," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 1938-1970, June.
  8. Rosser Jr., J. Barkley, 2007. "The rise and fall of catastrophe theory applications in economics: Was the baby thrown out with the bathwater?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(10), pages 3255-3280, October.
  9. Bauer, Christian & De Grauwe, Paul & Reitz, Stefan, 2009. "Exchange rate dynamics in a target zone--A heterogeneous expectations approach," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 329-344, February.
  10. Ho, Thomas S Y & Saunders, Anthony, 1980. " A Catastrophe Model of Bank Failure," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 35(5), pages 1189-1207, December.
  11. Wang, Yaw-Huei & Keswani, Aneel & Taylor, Stephen J., 2006. "The relationships between sentiment, returns and volatility," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 109-123.
  12. Georges, Christophre, 2008. "Staggered updating in an artificial financial market," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(9), pages 2809-2825, September.
  13. LeBaron, Blake, 2006. "Agent-based Computational Finance," Handbook of Computational Economics,in: Leigh Tesfatsion & Kenneth L. Judd (ed.), Handbook of Computational Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 24, pages 1187-1233 Elsevier.
  14. Finucane, Thomas J., 1991. "Put-Call Parity and Expected Returns," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 26(04), pages 445-457, December.
  15. Zeeman, E. C., 1974. "On the unstable behaviour of stock exchanges," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 1(1), pages 39-49, March.
  16. Hommes, Cars H., 2006. "Heterogeneous Agent Models in Economics and Finance," Handbook of Computational Economics,in: Leigh Tesfatsion & Kenneth L. Judd (ed.), Handbook of Computational Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 23, pages 1109-1186 Elsevier.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.

as
in new window


Cited by:

  1. Xu, Yan & Hu, Bin & Wu, Jiang & Zhang, Jianhua, 2014. "Nonlinear analysis of the cooperation of strategic alliances through stochastic catastrophe theory," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 400(C), pages 100-108.
  2. Kukacka, Jiri & Barunik, Jozef, 2016. "Estimation of financial agent-based models with simulated maximum likelihood," FinMaP-Working Papers 63, Collaborative EU Project FinMaP - Financial Distortions and Macroeconomic Performance: Expectations, Constraints and Interaction of Agents.
  3. Chiarella, Carl & He, Xue-Zhong & Zheng, Min, 2011. "An analysis of the effect of noise in a heterogeneous agent financial market model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 148-162, January.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:33:y:2009:i:10:p:1824-1836. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Dana Niculescu)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.