Stylized Facts

Although theoretical and empirical literature regarding the stylized facts shows evidence of their correlations to herding behavior in financial markets, the causes of such phenomena are still unknown. Using an agent-based model strengthened by the competition co-evolution algorithm (STGP) technique, this study provides laboratory evidence on capital market dynamics and analyses the behavioral foundations of stylized facts such as fat tails, leverage effects, and volatility clustering. The simulated stock markets consist of two groups; the “Best agents”, which are a small portion of artificial agents, and the “Residual agents”, which are the main group of artificial agents. The best performance in terms of breeding fitness returns is the main feature of the “Best agents”. More, the size of the “Best Agents” group is specified as 2.5%, 5%, 10% &20% of the total population size. An agent-based model consists of two portions, a two thousand population of trader agents that each has its decision-making strategy, and a virtual market that creates the trading strategies. Then the model evolved step by step using a feed with real quotes of the financial instruments by Adaptive Modeler. A training period is considered 2500 bars (started in November 2003), and the test period started in December 2013. The observation shows that the herding behavior in the price series created by the “Residual agents” is less than the “Best agents” series. Therefore, the greater diversity of trade strategies as the genetic differences of artificial agents leads to less herding. The observations exhibit that the volatility clustering, leverage effects, and nonlinear dependence are more likely to experience in the price series generated by “Best gents”. Furthermore, observations indicate that if the population is well diversified in terms of trading strategies, the efficiency of the market increases.

Both Afghanistan and Bangladesh have a per capita income below $500 early 21st century, but now Bangladesh’s per capita income is more than 3 times that of Afghanistan. Surprisingly, at the beginning of the period, Bangladesh have worser than Afghanistan in the corruption perception indices, and hence a small government has been sufficient to experience high economic growth. However, emphasizing small government such as that promoted by the World Bank’s 1980s model is not suffice for low-income, resource-scarce, landlocked countries like Afghanistan. In such contexts, institutions are not capable of transforming financial resources into effective public services. Using Paul Collier’s framework, this paper evaluates how institutional performance and economic policies function in Afghanistan’s failure to achieve development. The aim is to examine the undevelopment trap of bad governance and ineffective policies in Afghanistan. The period 2005–2019 divided into three five-year sub-periods and then each sub-period is analyzed by a stylized-facts-based approach. The findings indicate that during the first period (2005–2009), the economic management had the strongest performance with an average score above the threshold 3, while criteria of the public sector management and institutions had the weakest performance, scoring below the threshold. Since the average of all indices was remained consistently below the Collier’s threshold, it is concluded that Afghanistan entraped in a bad governance trap. This trend is been continued in the second (2010–2014) and third (2015–2019) periods, albeit criteria structural policies, instead of public sector management and institutions in the first period, has worst status.