In recent decades, the financial markets have experienced various crises, shocks and disruptive events (dot.com bubble in 2000, global financial crisis in 2008-2009, COVID-19, etc.), driving high levels of volatility. This volatility is too strong to be fully justified simply by changes in fundamentals giving less credit to hypotheses concerning market efficiency and rationality as in the seminal work of Samuelson (1965) and Fama (1970). Further, the whole economy has recently shown different episodes of high inflation, uncertainty, commodity prices volatilities, geopolitical instability, etc.

In order to better understand the dynamics of asset prices in this context, several alternative assumptions referring to behavioral finance theory (Irrational exuberance (Shiller, 2000), Animal Spirits (Akerlof and Shiller, 2009) and Narrative Economics Theory (Shiller, 2017), etc.) have been put forward. Interestingly, there has been an increase in this behavioral finance literature in recent years due in particular to two major factors: first, the development of finance experiments and simulations related to agent-based models among others, and second, the development of several empirical measures of market and investor sentiment (VIX, Michigan University indexes, Backer and Wurgler (2007) index, etc.) and behavioral econometric modeling.

In other words, current financial price assets appear to be driven by various attractors in addition to fundamentals, and there is no doubt that investor’s emotions, market sentiment, the news, and external factors such as uncertainty all play a key role. This has been clearly observed in recent years, especially during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has changed the common perception of the way financial markets work.

The 4 th IEAP meeting, which will be organized at IAE Lille University School of Management but also online on 29th January 2025, aims to discuss these highly relevant issues linked to asset pricing (financial, commodity, cryptocurrencies), behavioral and emotional finance. Our research day invites academics and professionals to discuss their latest research findings related to the key topics, and will also serve as a valuable platform for discussing innovative and thought-provoking ideas in behavioral finance.