Pricing credit default swaps with bilateral value adjustments

The aim of this work is to examine the influence of mutual fund flows on market timing models, thus providing unbiased timing coefficients. However, as this control is motivated by the existing relationship between mutual fund flows and market returns, we first analyse this relationship, considering previous and concurrent market returns. However, unlike existing studies, we do not consider future returns, since investors do not observe them when making investment decisions. Thus, we feel it is more appropriate to consider expected market returns. We construct the expected market returns by running an AR model and considering the available public information about the macro-economy. The relationship is analysed under different conditions, considering a variety of different mutual fund flow measures, and considering (or not) the sensitivity of mutual fund flows to positive and negative market returns. We also propose different controls for the traditional timing models, and we further analyse the reverse-causality problem. The study demonstrates, for a sample of equity mutual funds registered for sale in the USA, that the poor market timing performance found in this and other prior studies can be completely attributed to the perverse effect of the fund managers’ liquidity service.     

On the nature of mean-variance spanning

Asset spanning tests are very useful tools for the determination of which asset classes belong to an investor's portfolio. There are numerous applications of such tools in the finance literature. What is not so obvious is the proper decision an investor should make if the extra asset classes are spanned by some existing assets. Should the investor make a conscious decision not to invest in them as they add no value? Should the investor invest in them anyway as they do no harm? This study provides an analytical solution to the puzzle and also offers an economic rationale.     

房地产价格指数周期的宏观分析

本文建立了中国房地产价格指数的投机度模型,区分了房地产价格增长的价值和泡沫成分,动态刻画了一个由基本面增长、泡沫推动及价格的价值回归等因素共同作用形成的完整房地产价格周期,定量地研究了现阶段我国房地产的泡沫度及其发展趋势,得出了我国房地产市场泡沫成分对货币流动性高度敏感的结论。通过稳定性测试,我们定量分析了货币政策回归稳健对房地产市场可能带来的冲击,并对地方政府、商业银行及监管部门提供了建议。     

美国土地制度和土地金融的历史变迁

得天独厚的资源禀赋和市场配置机制,再加上其土地制度的设计几乎没有历史包袱,是最接近"理想"条件的产物,使美国土地市场以及相关的金融市场高度发达,并具有吸收泡沫的一定深度和韧性。土地资源通过金融体系与资本密切结合,使美国工业化和城市化得到了有效支撑。但是,美国金融监管对土地开发与信用扩张之间强正反馈关系警惕不足,历史上反复出现土地或房地产投机引发的资产泡沫;美国农业仍存在过度补贴和补贴非市场化的问题,对土地要素的市场化形成制约;美国的土地征用、分区规划等政策工具使用也曾带来了严重的社会问题。     

Asset Bubbles: an Application to Residential Real Estate

Behavioural models offer new insights into why bubbles are ubiquitous in residential real estate markets. These markets are dominated by unsophisticated households who often develop optimistic views by extrapolating from past returns. Rational investors cannot easily trade against an overvaluation of housing assets because of high transaction costs and a binding short sale constraint. Circumventing the effect of the latter, the supply of housing frequently increases in response to rising prices. This helps to mitigate bubbles but often leads to overbuilding, which slows down the recovery after a bubble bursts. Models that incorporate the effects of perverse incentives and limits to arbitrage are especially helpful in explaining the bubble that developed in mortgage‐backed securities and helped fuel the recent real estate bubble by relaxing home buyers’ borrowing constraints. The literature is ambiguous about whether governments should intervene to burst bubbles, as a better response may lie in improving incentives of key market players.     

Have Equity REITs Experienced Periodically Collapsing Bubbles?

This paper uses the momentum threshold autoregressive (MTAR) model and the residuals-augmented Dickey–Fuller (RADF) test to examine the possibility of Evans’ (1991) periodically collapsing bubbles in the equity REIT market. The results are mixed. The MTAR model indicates that overall real equity REIT prices and dividends are cointegrated with asymmetric adjustment towards the long-run equilibrium. However, the estimated coefficients of the MTAR model do not indicate the presence of periodically collapsing bubbles. Adjustment in the standard cointegration tests of bubbles for skewness and excess kurtosis via the RADF test fails to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration, leaving the possibility of periodically collapsing bubbles. The MTAR and RADF results with respect to equity REIT sub-sectors are mixed. Lodging is the only sub-sector in which both the MTAR and RADF results support periodically collapsing bubbles. Moreover, market fundamentals proxied by two alternative measures of capacity utilization do not explain either real equity REIT prices or dividends.     

Do stock price bubbles influence corporate investment?

Dispersion in investor beliefs and short-selling constraints can lead to stock market bubbles. This paper argues that firms, unlike investors, can exploit such bubbles by issuing new shares at inflated prices. This lowers the cost of capital and increases real investment. Perhaps surprisingly, large bubbles are not eliminated in equilibrium nor do large bubbles necessarily imply large distortions. Using the variance of analysts’ earnings forecasts to proxy for the dispersion of investor beliefs, we find that increases in dispersion cause increases in new equity issuance, Tobin's Q, and real investment, as predicted by the model.     

资产价格泡沫与货币政策响应--基于Taylor规则的分析

本文从Taylor规则的分析角度出发,讨论资产价格泡沫与货币政策的关系.本文通过加入资本市场因素对Taylor规则进行了动态扩展,以研究1994年第1季度到2001年第4季度中国的货币政策是否对股市泡沫做出响应.本文的研究结论表明,在这一时期内中国的货币政策表现为一种不稳定的规则,中央银行并未运用利率政策抑制股市泡沫增长,在不经意间容忍了明显的股市泡沫.     

资产价格泡沫化与金融危机

本文从文献述评的角度,归纳研究了资产价格与金融危机的特征和相互作用的机理。在金融危机的孕育阶段,金融自由化、经济上升周期、货币政策、国际资本流动和心理等因素导致或助涨资产价格向上运动和泡沫化现象。金融危机通常在局部地区和市场首先触发,并向实体经济蔓延并实现国际传导,在泡沫崩溃和危机传导过程中,流动性枯竭和金融系统的脆弱性发挥了重要作用。最后,本文给出了加强金融体系改革和宏观审慎管理的几点建议。     

Leveraged Lévy processes as models for stock prices

Adopting a constant elasticity of variance formulation in the context of a general Lévy process as the driving uncertainty we show that the presence of the leverage effect? ?One explanation of the documented negative relation between market volatilities and the level of asset prices (the ‘smile’ or ‘skew’), we term the ‘leverage effect’, argues that this negative relation reflects greater risk taking by the management, induced by a fall in the asset price, with a view of maximizing the option value of equity shareholders. in this form has the implication that asset price processes satisfy a scaling hypothesis. We develop forward partial integro-differential equations under a general Markovian setup, and show in two examples (both continuous and pure-jump Lévy) how to use them for option pricing when stock prices follow our leveraged Lévy processes. Using calibrated models we then show an example of simulation-based pricing and report on the adequacy of using leveraged Lévy models to value equity structured products.     

中国房地产市场价格泡沫与空间传染效应

本文使用对数周期性幂律(Log Period Power Law, LPPL)模型对房地产市场价格泡沫进行测度,运用空间计量模型对我国房地产市场价格泡沫和空间传染效应进行研究。LPPL模型认为由价格泡沫产生并最终破裂的金融市场与地震系统具有很多相似之处,即金融资产的价格呈周期性变化规律,价格持续上涨到临界状态直至反转。本文采用2010年6月至2017年11月间我国100个城市的房地产市场数据对各城市房地产价格泡沫进行测度和物理/经济空间传染效应研究。研究发现,LPPL模型能够对我国100个城市房地产价格泡沫进行甄别且主要存在两种泡沫状态:正向泡沫(房价持续上升)和反转泡沫(房价整体下降却存在反转点)。各个城市(地区)房地产价格具有较强的空间传染性;存在正向泡沫区域的空间传染性相较反转泡沫区域更为明显,在考虑经济空间测度而不是物理空间测度的情况下,各城市间的空间传染性更强。与现有文献不同,我们发现反转泡沫区域的新房价格指数特别是二手房价格指数的上升对周边城市的房地产价格指数存在强烈的正向推高影响。最后,本文发现城市的房地产调控政策在一定程度上抑制了房价传统影响(比如信贷、新房、二手房价等)因素的推高影响,但各城市房地产价格之间的联动变化特征应该引起监管部门的注意。     

Bubbles,banks and financial stability

The macroeconomic impact of rational bubbles in a limited commitment economy crucially depends on whether banks or ordinary savers hold the bubble. Banks hold the bubble asset when their leverage is high, when long-term real interest rates are low or when lax supervision allows them to enjoy high deposit insurance subsidies. When banks are the bubble-holders, this amplifies the output boom by reducing loan–deposit rate spreads while the bubble survives but also deepens the recession when the bubble bursts. In contrast, the real impact of bubbles held by ordinary savers is more muted.     

Real options in finance

Although the academic literature on real options has grown enormously over the past three decades, the adoption of formal real option valuation models by practitioners appears to be lagging. Yet, survey evidence indicates that managers’ decisions are near optimal and consistent with real option theory. We critically review real options research and point out its strengths and weaknesses. We discuss recent contributions published in this issue of the journal and highlight avenues for future research. We conclude that, in some ways, academic research in real options has catching up to do with current practice.     

金融泡沫与房地产泡沫的共生模型研究

近年来随着我国房地产业的迅猛发展,我国房地产业是否出现泡沫,房地产泡沫是否引发金融泡沫越来越受到人们的关注。本文剖析了房地产泡沫引发金融泡沫的主要机理,同时从金融泡沫的角度出发,通过条件假设,简化推导出房地产泡沫破灭导致借贷市场失衡的房地产泡沫率临界值,进而以现实泡沫率与泡沫率临界值的比较分析,判定房地产泡沫引发金融泡沫的可能性,并针对其中最具影响的关键因素提出了防范房地产泡沫引发金融泡沫的措施。     

In America's thrall: the effects of the US market and US security characteristics on Australian stock returns

Can Australian equity returns be modelled by ‘home‐grown’ factors? We examine the indigenous capital asset pricing model, the indigenous Fama–French three‐factor model, and extensions to the latter, and find them all wanting. We find evidence of domestic market segmentation in Australia. For the smallest firms, all the models we study fail. For the largest Australian firms, we find that the US Fama–French three factors (downloaded from French's website: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/ken.french/ ) provide a successful model of Australian returns. It is as if the largest firms in the Australian market are simply part of the larger US market.     

Risk premia,asset price bubbles,and monetary policy

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium asset pricing model with heterogeneous beliefs to study the effects of monetary policy on prices, risk premia, asset price bubbles, and financial stability. We propose a new framework for monetary policy with respect to bubbles. Because bubble risk premia arise from an interaction between disagreements among investors and dynamic trading constraints, under a non-accommodative monetary policy, liquidity adjusted risk and bubble risk premia increase. What matters for policy is the trading constrained fraction/mass of agents that disagree about fundamentals (i.e. optimists/pessimists). Accommodative policy can lead to a larger fraction of trading constrained agents that disagree, larger bubbles, and increased systemic risk. An implication of our results is that accommodative monetary policy in response to the Covid-19 crisis does not increase systemic risk due to asset price bubbles, as long as the policy keeps inflation under control.     

On the equivalence of the static and dynamic asset allocation problems

A classic dynamic asset allocation problem optimizes the expected final-time utility of wealth, for an individual who can invest in a risky stock and a risk-free bond, trading continuously in time. Recently, several authors considered the corresponding static asset allocation problem in which the individual cannot trade but can invest in options as well as the underlying. The optimal static strategy can never do better than the optimal dynamic one. Surprisingly, however, for some market models the two approaches are equivalent. When this happens the static strategy is clearly preferable, since it avoids any impact of market frictions. This paper examines the question: when, exactly, are the static and dynamic approaches equivalent? We give an easily tested necessary and sufficient condition, and many non-trivial examples. Our analysis assumes that the stock follows a scalar diffusion process, and uses the completeness of the resulting market model. A simple special case is when the drift and volatility depend only on time; then the two approaches are equivalent precisely if (μ (t)? r)/σ²(t) is constant. This is not the Sharpe ratio or the market price of risk, but rather a nondimensional ratio of excess return to squared volatility that arises naturally in portfolio optimization problems.     

What is the impact of wealth shocks on asset allocation?

I test the assumption of constant relative risk aversion using U.S. macroeconomic data and analyse the role of wealth shocks in generating transitory changes in asset portfolio composition. I show that the risky asset share exhibits cyclical behavior and it is significantly (and positively) affected by unexpected variation in wealth. Therefore, the empirical evidence suggests that risk aversion is counter-cyclical. I also find that the portfolio share of housing wealth falls when the agent is faced with a positive wealth shock, i.e. housing is a hedge against unfavorable wealth fluctuations. Finally, considering a variety of wealth definitions, the results show that: (i) wealth effects are stronger for direct holdings of risky assets than for indirect holdings, which highlights that investors do not typically trade some assets such as pension or mutual funds; (ii) although significant, wealth effects on asset allocation are mainly temporary as agents quickly rebalance the asset portfolio composition (i.e. there is weak evidence of inertia or slow adjustment in asset allocation); and (iii) changes in expected returns partially explain the variation in risky asset allocation.     

Multifactor models and their consistency with the ICAPM

Can any multifactor model be interpreted as a variant of the Intertemporal CAPM (ICAPM)? The ICAPM places restrictions on time-series and cross-sectional behavior of state variables and factors. If a state variable forecasts positive (negative) changes in investment opportunities in time-series regressions, its innovation should earn a positive (negative) risk price in the cross-sectional test of the respective multifactor model. Second, the market (covariance) price of risk must be economically plausible as an estimate of the coefficient of relative risk aversion (RRA). We apply our ICAPM criteria to eight popular multifactor models and the results show that most models do not satisfy the ICAPM restrictions. Specifically, the “hedging” risk prices have the wrong sign and the estimates of RRA are not economically plausible. Overall, the Fama and French (1993) and Carhart (1997) models perform the best in consistently meeting the ICAPM restrictions. The remaining models, which represent some of the most relevant examples presented in the empirical asset pricing literature, can still empirically explain the size, value, and momentum anomalies, but they are generally inconsistent with the ICAPM.     

Bubbles and capital flow volatility: Causes and risk management

Emerging market economies are fertile ground for the development of real estate and other financial bubbles. Despite these economies’ significant growth potential, their corporate and government sectors do not generate the financial instruments to provide residents with adequate stores of value. Capital often flows out of these economies seeking these stores of value in the developed world. Bubbles are beneficial because they provide domestic stores of value and thereby reduce capital outflows while increasing investment. But they come at a cost, as they expose the country to bubble-crashes and capital flow reversals. We show that domestic financial underdevelopment not only facilitates the emergence of bubbles, but also leads agents to undervalue the aggregate risk embodied in financial bubbles. In this context, even rational bubbles can be welfare reducing. We study a set of aggregate risk management policies to alleviate the bubble-risk. We show that liquidity requirements, sterilization of capital inflows and structural policies aimed at developing public debt markets ‘collateralized’ by future revenues, all have a high payoff in this environment.