Assessing the quality of a security market: a new approach to transaction-cost measurement

I discuss a new method for measuring the deviations betweenactual transaction prices and implicit efficient prices. Theapproach decomposes security transaction prices into random-walkand stationary components. The random-walk component may beidentified with the efficient price. The stationary component,the difference between the efficient price and the actual transactionprice, is termed the pricing error. Its dispersion is a naturalmeasure of market quality. I describe practical strategies forestimating these quantities. For a sample of NYSE stocks, theaverage pricing error standard deviation estimate is roughly0.33 percent of the stock price. If the pricing error is normallydistributed and if it is always a positive cost incurred bythe transaction initiators, the corresponding average transactioncost for these traders is 0.26 percent of the stock price. Thedispersion of the pricing error is also found to be elevatedat the beginning and end of the trading session.     

城市环境特征品质与中国房地产价格的区域差异

从城市环境特征角度研究中国房地产价格的区间差异,在Roback理论模型基础上提出了估计中国城市消费者和厂商环境特征品质价值的计量方法,并对我国所有地级及以上城市进行了截面分析.消费者环境特征品质方程估计结果显示:自然环境对我国居民效用水平的影响类似于其对美国居民的影响,工业污染严重地损害了居民的福利水平,但是,公共服务水平对我国居民效用水平的影响并不显著.厂商生产性环境特征品质方程的估计结果则表明,城市间交通条件、工业集聚以及生产性服务都对厂商有显著的价值.     

List price signaling and buyer behavior in the housing market

To determine whether list price contains useful information for anticipating trends in eventual transactions prices, we develop a model of buyer behavior from a search-theoretic perspective. Using data from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, housing market between 1985 and 1992, we estimate separate price indexes with list price and selling price as the respective dependent variables in the hedonic regressions. Consistent with our theory, we find that the list price may lead the market when functioning as a signal of seller intent, but list price will probably lag a market driven by buyer willingness to purchase. Granger causality tests conducted on quarterly data for the eight-year study support listing price as a leading indicator of selling price. However, an examination of the indexes around the period of market reversal suggest otherwise. Indeed, listing prices appear to contain the least useful information at the times when information would be most valuable: at the peaks and troughs of the market cycle.     

Prices and Unit Values in Poverty Measurement and Tax Reform Analysis

Researchers often use unit values (household expenditures ona commodity divided by the quantity purchased) as proxies formarket prices when calculating poverty lines and estimatingconsumer demand equations. Such proxies are often needed becausecommunity price surveys in developing economies are either absentor suffer quality problems. However, using unit values may resultin biases due to measurement error and quality effects. In ahousehold survey experiment, information on prices was obtainedin three ways: from unit values, from a market price survey,and from the opinions of householders who were shown picturesof items and asked to report the local price. The three setsof price data are used to calculate poverty lines, estimateprice elasticities, and analyze marginal tax reforms. Thereare substantial biases when unit values are used as a proxyfor market price, even when sophisticated correction methodsare applied. Performance was better for the price opinions ofhousehold members. The results highlight the importance of pricecollection methods and the need to consider the wider costsof having potentially unreliable community-level price data.     

Effects of speculation and interest rates in a “carry trade” model of commodity prices

The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants' expectations of future price changes on the other hand. It goes beyond past research by bringing to bear new data sources: survey data to measure expectations of future changes in commodity prices and options data to measure perceptions of risk. Some evidence is found of a negative effect of interest rates on the demand for inventories and thereby on commodity prices and positive effects of expected future price gains on inventory demand and thereby on today's commodity prices.     

金融周期对房地产价格的影响——基于SV-TVP-VAR模型的实证研究

本文利用2004-2016年的季度数据构建金融周期综合指数,用以描述金融市场景气程度;使用SV-TVP-VAR模型,围绕金融周期对我国房地产价格的影响进行实证研究。结果表明,金融周期对房地产价格的影响具有明显的时变性特征:2008年以前金融市场繁荣对房价有稳定推升作用,2008年后该影响持续弱化;与之类似,实体经济对房价的影响同样自2008年起逐渐减小。这意味着,在经济增长方式转变和经济结构调整的过程中,我国房地产价格对经济金融冲击的敏感度已经大幅下降,金融扩张可能难以再通过房地产市场有效带动实体经济的繁荣,相反,其反而可能导致银行贷款不良率的攀升,在金融系统内积累系统性风险。我国针对房地产的宏观调控政策不仅对控制贷款不良率的提高体现出积极作用,而且自2008年国际金融危机以来,产出及房价的随机波动率均呈显著下降趋势,风险得到有效控制。未来应更加重视房地产市场调控在宏观审慎政策框架中的重要地位,遏制房地产金融化泡沫化势头,防范房地产市场引发金融危机。     

Dynamics of Urban Residential Property Prices— A Case Study of the Manhattan Market

In a multivariate vector autoregression framework, this paper investigates the weak efficiency of the urban residential real estate market and the cause of weak efficiency. An error correction model is used to estimate long-term relationships among apartment prices and adjustment speed from disequilibrium to equilibrium. Based on a unique dataset of the Manhattan market, the efficiency of this market, seasonal stationarity of property prices, and the weak exogeneity of leading sub-markets are studied. Our results indicate that, in a market of less heterogeneity and higher transaction volumes, the weak efficiency hypothesis is rejected as in previous studies. This result implies that heterogeneity and lack of transaction information may not be the direct source of market inefficiency. Meanwhile, it is found that there are stable long-term relations among prices of different sub-markets. Interestingly, the price of one-bedroom co-operatives (co-op) is weakly exogenous. This implies that the starting co-op for most home buyers in urban areas is a leading indicator of the entire market, which contradicts the claim that high-end luxury co-op leads the market.     

Hawkes model for price and trades high-frequency dynamics

We introduce a multivariate Hawkes process that accounts for the dynamics of market prices through the impact of market order arrivals at microstructural level. Our model is a point process mainly characterized by four kernels associated with, respectively, the trade arrival self-excitation, the price changes mean reversion, the impact of trade arrivals on price variations and the feedback of price changes on trading activity. It allows one to account for both stylized facts of market price microstructure (including random time arrival of price moves, discrete price grid, high-frequency mean reversion, correlation functions behaviour at various time scales) and the stylized facts of market impact (mainly the concave-square-root-like/relaxation characteristic shape of the market impact of a meta-order). Moreover, it allows one to estimate the entire market impact profile from anonymous market data. We show that these kernels can be empirically estimated from the empirical conditional mean intensities. We provide numerical examples, application to real data and comparisons to former approaches.     

土地价格、土地财政与宏观经济波动

本文在一个包含金融加速器的新凯恩斯动态一般均衡模型中引入土地财政和政府隐性担保融资机制,借此考察在土地财政体制下土地价格的波动特征、驱动因素和对宏观经济的影响机制,同时使用2004Q1到2016Q1的中国宏观经济数据对模型进行贝叶斯估计。方差分解的结果表明,在样本期间,土地需求冲击、土地供给冲击和货币政策冲击是驱动中国土地价格变动的主要因素,货币政策冲击和土地供给冲击是引起短期土地价格波动的主要因素,土地需求冲击在长期中驱动了土地价格波动。数值模拟结果发现,土地财政对宏观经济波动具有放大效应,正向的土地需求冲击将推高土地价格,并通过抵押约束机制引起宏观经济波动,地方政府对土地财政的依赖将放大该效应,并进一步对土地价格形成正向反馈,从而引起宏观经济更大的波动;在土地财政体制下,正向的土地供给冲击有助于抑制土地价格上涨,并减少宏观经济波动。     

Implicit pricing across residential rental submarkets

This paper examines implicit price differences of rental housing characteristics across various property types to measure whether determinants of rents are valued in the aggregate or separately. The results show that hedonic price functions are not identical across property types, which suggests that ordinary least squares is not the appropriate estimation technique when modeling the implicit prices for an aggregate rental market. Generalized least squares estimation of a random coefficient model removes the restriction of fixed parameters imposed by OLS and allows estimation of implicit prices for rental markets containing multiple property types.