Royal African Company Share Prices during the South Sea Bubble

Price bubbles provide a unique opportunity to test whether investors act rationally and have sufficient knowledge of the economic environment in which they trade. We focus our attention on the 1720 South Sea bubble episode as experienced by a company not involved in governmental debt financing—the Royal African Company. Following the example of the South Sea Company, the Royal African Company lent its funds to equityholders at a preferential rate. Recognizing this benefit along with the announced dividends explains a large portion of the bubble. Furthermore, the unexplained residual does not behave like an exploding bubble, casting doubt that speculative excess motivated market participants in 1720. Our findings are indeed consistent with investor rationality, and the unexplained residual suggests that we are missing information that was available to the British financial market in 1720.     

我国股市泡沫状态分析

正确分析当前中国股市的估值水平及泡沫程度,对促进我国股市的健康平稳发展具有重大的现实意义。本文通过对海外市盈率的比较分析,认为我国目前股市市盈率还处于安全区域,静态市盈率短期还会上涨。市场现在的确存在泡沫,但是结构性泡沫,从结构性泡沫到出现全面泡沫,市场可能还有相当一段距离,A股市场第三季度将走向调整。中国股市在未来一段时期内,仍将会以比较高的速率上涨。     

股市泡沫检验研究综述及实证分析

本文实证检验了上证综合指数和深证成份指数数据样本的泡沫水平，并利用单位根检验方法进一步对泡沫序列进行了分析，结论主要有：我国股票市场长期存在泡沫，多数时期泡沫水平都比较高，尤其在股指上升时，泡沫水平通常随之上升，可见泡沫对股市上涨的推动作用明显。而从2005年开始到2007年10月的股市新一轮上涨中，股市的泡沫成分也是空前规模存在的。我国股市泡沫总体上属于理性泡沫，但局部的非理性泡沫时有发生，而在股指快速上涨时，非理性泡沫最为严重。     

中国股市投机泡沫的膨胀与破灭:机制转换模型的应用

本文运用机制转换模型研究收益率与换手率的非线性关系,以此描述中国股票市场投机泡沫的膨胀及部分破灭的演进过程。结果证明中国股票市场存在膨胀中会部分破灭的投机泡沫。市场大幅下跌概率的样本内、样本外估计值能较好预测历史数据中出现的最大实际损失,说明机制转换模型具有良好的预测能力;投机泡沫的部分破灭是导致中国股票市场价格大幅下跌的主要原因。     

浅析流动性过剩背景下的股市泡沫

流动性过剩已成为中国经济发展中的一个热点问题.文章分析了形成流动性过剩的国际和国内两个方面的原因.对于流动性过剩导致了中国股市繁荣的现状,文章提出了防范股市泡沫的措施.     

本币升值对股市的影响——基于日本的经验研究

作为一国经济晴雨表的股票市场，不可避免地受到汇率变动的影响。文章以日本为例，分析本币升值对股市的影响。分析表明，本币升值在短期内推动本国股市繁荣，往往伴生股市泡沫，但继续升值预期一旦消失，股市往往出现大幅度下跌。因此，在人民币持续升值的背景下，必须根据我国的实际情况慎重考虑其对股市的影响。     

The micro‐foundations of the early London capital market: Bank of England shareholders during and after the South Sea Bubble, 1720–251

Using two sources, Bank of England Transfer Books and Stock Ledgers, this article explores the nature of the ‘customer base’ for Bank shares during and after the South Sea Bubble. This examination uncovers the nature of individual participation in this early capital market. The Transfer Ledgers record roughly 7,000 transfers during 1720, while the Ledger Books from 1720–25 record over 8,000 individuals holding stock. The analysis finds the customer base had breadth and depth, comprising individuals from across the social spectrum, from all over England and Europe. The market was diverse and liquid. Activity during the Bubble came from those living in and around London, with most traders participating in the market only twice at most. While the majority of participants were men, there was a sizeable female presence. Men as a group lost money from their market activity, but women made money. In the five years after the Bubble, the customer base was sustained. The analysis argues that the secondary market in financial assets cannot be dismissed as mere gambling devices, and that the basis for a mutually productive interaction between the financial sector and the real sector of the economy was already in existence and was sustained through the shock of the South Sea Bubble and its collapse.     

Macroeconomic factors and the empirical content of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory in the Japanese stock market

This paper investigates the empirical evidence of the pricing of macroeconomic factors in the Japanese stock market during the bubble period using Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) model. We also examine pre- and post-bubble periods in order to compare the robustness of priced factors over the bubble period. We find that the empirical content of the APT, namely the implied across-equation pricing restrictions, is not rejected in any of the sample period.     

Equity,Bonds, Institutional Debt and Economic Growth: Evidence from South Africa

We examine the finance‐growth nexus in South Africa accounting for the role of bond markets, stock markets, and bank and non‐bank financial intermediaries using a vector autoregressive technique. Extant empirical literature has largely accounted for only banks and stock markets, ignoring bond market and non‐bank financial intermediaries. We find that bond market development affects economic growth in South Africa, and no similar effect is observed for the bank and non‐bank financial intermediaries and the stock market. Our finding shows that examination of individual elements of the financial system is important in understanding the unique effect of each on growth. The observation that the bond market rather than stock market, bank and non‐bank institutions promote economic growth in South Africa induces an intriguing question as to what unique roles bond markets play that the intermediaries and equity market are unable to play.     

Efficiency,Cointegration and Contagion in Equity Markets: Evidence from China,Japan and South Korea*

This paper empirically examines whether three East Asian stock markets, namely, those of China, Japan and South Korea, are individually and/or jointly efficient, and whether contagion exists between the cointegrated markets. While individual market efficiency is examined through testing for the random walk hypothesis, joint market efficiency is examined through testing for cointegration and contagion. The present study finds that the hypothesis of individual market efficiency is strongly rejected for the Chinese stock market, but not for the Japanese and the South Korean stock markets. However, when testing for cointegration, market efficiency is strongly rejected for all these markets. We take a simple case of contagion and find that although there is a long‐term relationship among the three markets, the contagion hypothesis cannot be rejected only between Japanese and South Korean stock markets, indicating short‐run portfolio diversification benefits from these two markets.     

Stock Market's Response to Real Output Shocks in China: A VARwAL Estimation

This paper studies the connection between the stock market and real output in China and compares it with benchmark countries, employing a novel vector autoregression with asymmetric leads (VARwAL) model. It makes two contributions. First, it finds that the time profile of the Chinese stock market's response to real output shocks suggests no evidence of a distorted relationship due to manipulation of Chinese real output data or domination of the Chinese stock market by individual investors. Rather, the Chinese stock market is relatively more responsive to real output, in line with the larger share of manufacturing in the Chinese economy. Electricity output and industrial profits, two different, less-manipulable time series, yield similar results. Second, it presents the first use of VARwAL impulse responses to detect stock market bubbles: VARwAL captures the 2015 bubble in China successfully. Over the full sample period, China's stock market appears to have been less prone to bubbles than the US stock market.     

LIQUIDITY AND THE INFORMATIONAL EFFICIENCY OF AFRICAN STOCK MARKETS

The hypothesis that a stock market price index follows a random walk is tested for 11 African stock markets, Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe using joint variance ratio tests with finite-sample critical values, over the period beginning in January 2000 and ending in September 2006. The iid random walk hypothesis is rejected in all 11 markets. In four stock markets, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunisia and South Africa, weekly returns are a martingale difference sequence. Liquidity is an important factor which contributes to whether a stock market follows a random walk.     

Share portfolios in the early years of financial capitalism: London, 1690–1730

The dramatic expansion of public and private financial markets in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution has received extensive attention. Despite this, little is known about how ordinary individual investors managed risk within this framework. Using a newly constructed dataset of share ownership for those joint‐stock companies listed in the financial press of the day, we reconstruct individual portfolio holdings for investors in these companies. We examine individual portfolio holdings first for the decade after the Glorious Revolution and then for the years around the South Sea Bubble. Despite a fivefold increase in the number of unique individuals in the market between the 1690s and the 1720s, we find that in each period roughly 80 per cent of those active in the equity market held shares in only one company, even though many shareholders had the capacity or wealth to diversify share portfolios. These outcomes suggest diversification against idiosyncratic liquidity risk. Overall, however, there is limited evidence that individuals were using their financial portfolios to protect against diversifiable shocks. For many, we argue, company‐specific voting and firm governance rules drove market activity.     

The spirit of capitalism, stock market bubbles and output fluctuations

This paper presents a representative agent model in which stock market bubbles cause output fluctuations. Assuming that utility depends directly on wealth, we show that stock market bubbles arise if the marginal utility of wealth does not decline to zero as wealth goes to infinity. Bubbles can affect output positively or negative depending on whether the production function exhibits increasing or decreasing returns to scale. In sunspot equilibria, the bursting of a bubble is followed by a sharp decline in output one period later. Various numerical examples are given to illustrate the behavior of stochastic bubbles and the relationship between bubbles and output.     

基于流动性下的股市透析

自1999年开始,中国政府开始推出了一系列的管理规定,使得货币市场和资本市场开始有了一定的衔接,货币政策的传导机制逐渐影响资本市场的价格和波动性,随着经济和社会法制的发展和完善,两个市场间的相关性逐渐密切。2005年以来,我国货币市场的流动性问题广泛受到国内学者和专家的关注,目前存在的流动性过剩以及股市持续高涨,房价泡沫现象与日本危机前所出现的经济现象有极大的相似性,本文试图从定性分析的角度来说明流动性过剩现象传导机制下的中国股市和其预期。     

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF LONG MEMORY IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN STOCK MARKET

This paper expands and augments the results of the paper by Jefferis and Thupayagale ) and tests the efficiency of the South African stock market with Wavelet and Markov Switching Regime analyses of selected shares and the a ALSI 40 data. The Wavelet analysis indicated that most of the individual share prices and the share index time series are mean reverting over the long run and follow a long memory process, offering evidence against weak-form efficient market hypothesis (EMH). The Markov model modelled the financial and prevalent economic conditions accurately and established the presence of patterns in the historic time series, providing additional support against the weak-form EMH.     

华侨开拓南美市场的现状与展望

19世纪初华侨开始大规模的移居南美,经过几代人的积累,华人在南美的到了较好的发展。近年来,中国与巴西、阿根廷的经济发展发展较快,为企业进入南美市场提供了一个良好的商贸环境。华人凭借勇于拼闯的精神已经在巴西、阿根廷有了一定的发展,给中国企业开拓南美市场提供了一个良好的商业基础。     

THE CHANGING EFFICIENCY OF AFRICAN STOCK MARKETS

This paper classifies formal African stock markets into four categories and discuses the principal characteristics of the seven markets covered in this study: South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mauritius and Kenya. Using a GARCH approach with time‐varying parameters, a test of evolving efficiency (TEE) is implemented for periods starting in the early 1990s and ending in June 2001. This test detects changes in weak form efficiency through time. The TEE finds that the Johannesburg stock market is weak form efficient throughout the period, and three stock markets become weak form efficient towards the end of the period: Egypt and Morocco from 1999 and Nigeria from early 2001. These contrast with the Kenya and Zimbabwe stock markets which show no tendency towards weak form efficiency and the Mauritius market which displays a slow tendency to eliminate inefficiency. The paper relates weak form efficiency to stock market turnover, capitalisation and institutional characteristics of markets.