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It is a common assertion that, in a world with perfect markets and rational expectations, endogenous cycles could only arise under very unrealistic assumptions. This paper offers a short discussion on this claim and a review of the relevant contributions to the literature on deterministic fluctuations in competitive models. It is argued that these types of fluctuations are more easily obtained when agents are assumed to be heterogeneous and when the production side of the economy is considered. The paper also discusses the existence of endogenous cycles in models with financial market imperfections and nonconvex technologies.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between risk premium and a time-varying conditional variance of spot rate using weekly Swiss franc/US dollar exchange-rate data. First, we apply an EGARCH-in-mean framework to test the unbiasedness hypothesis of the forward rate with a volatility dependent risk premium. The corresponding estimates point to no significant influence of volatility on the risk premium, and reject the unbiasedness hypothesis. Second, we apply a seminonparametric, nonlinear impulse-response analysis to the spot-rate change and the forward premium. This framework allows us to analyze the risk premium/volatility relationship without using a specific, parametric model such as EGARCH-in-mean. The latter analysis confirms the negative EGARCH-in-mean results with respect to the risk premium/volatility relationship, although the volatility dynamics estimated is clearly different from that implied by the EGARCH estimate. Moreover, the forward premium has a nonlinear dynamic influence on the spot rate, whereas the converse is not true.

This paper provides a guide to two FORTRAN programs, called TRT1.FOR and TRT2.FOR, written to run the two stages of the Ramsey and Rothman (1996) time-reversibility (TR) test. Original FORTRAN source code and executable (on an IBM-compatible PC) versions of the programs are available. The major step in successfully running the programs is setting up two ASCII control files, called TRT1.CNL and TRT2.CNL. Two examples are provided.