A robust textual analysis of the dynamics of Hong Kong property market

Market sentiments influence the dynamics of Hong Kong’s macro-critical property market, but the unobservable nature of market sentiments makes it difficult to systemically assess this sentiment channel. Using text mining techniques, this paper sets up a news-based property market sentiment index and a Google Trends-based buyer incentive index for Hong Kong and studies the sentiment channel of transmission in the Hong Kong property market. The news-based property market sentiment index can reflect the change in sentiments in past key events, with the sentiments in the primary market tending to lead that of the secondary market during the low housing supply period. For the Google Buyer Incentive Index, we find that it has value-added in forecasting (or nowcasting) the official property price index. In mapping out the sentiment channel using a structural vector-autoregressive model, we find that an improvement in market sentiments could stimulate buyers’ incentives, which then together would affect property prices and transaction volumes.     

Threshold estimation for continuous three-phase polynomial regression models with constant mean in the middle regime

This paper considers a continuous three-phase polynomial regression model with two threshold points for dependent data with heteroscedasticity. We assume the model is polynomial of order zero in the middle regime, and is polynomial of higher orders elsewhere. We denote this model by ${ℳ}_2$, which includes models with one or no threshold points, denoted by ${ℳ}_1$ and ${ℳ}_0$, respectively, as special cases. We provide an ordered iterative least squares (OiLS) method when estimating ${ℳ}_2$ and establish the consistency of the OiLS estimators under mild conditions. When the underlying model is ${ℳ}_1$ and is $(d_0-1)$th-order differentiable but not $d_0$th-order differentiable at the threshold point, we further show the $O_p(N^{-1/(d_0+2)})$ convergence rate of the OiLS estimators, which can be faster than the $O_p(N^{-1/(2d_0)})$ convergence rate given in Feder when $d_0\ge 3$. We also apply a model-selection procedure for selecting ${ℳ}_{\kappa }$; $\kappa =0,1,2$. When the underlying model exists, we establish the selection consistency under the aforementioned conditions. Finally, we conduct simulation experiments to demonstrate the finite-sample performance of our asymptotic results.     

The Economics of the Greenium: How Much is the World Willing to Pay to Save the Earth?

Environmental and Resource Economics - Sadly, not much. This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the greenium, the price premium the investor pays for green bonds over...     

Risk preference interactions between individual farmers and small farmer groups: Experimental evidence from rural Ethiopia

The understanding of risk preference interactions among poor farmers in developing countries has important policy implications, as many programs that aim to alleviate poverty and address risk constraints are provided on a collective basis. We conduct a randomized field experiment in the drought-prone parts of Northern Ethiopia and elicit from poor, vulnerable farmers their hypothetical willingness to pay using individual and group lottery games. Analyzing the certainty equivalent ratios (CERs), we find that farmer groups are more risk averse than individual farmers. When the risk of the lottery is high, the group CER is primarily determined by the most-risk-averse farmer of the group, and to a lesser extent, by the least. The median farmer contributes to the group CER only when the lottery risk is moderate. After participating in the group elicitation, individual farmers also become as risk averse as the group on average. Specifically, the median and the least-risk-averse farmers become significantly more risk averse while the most-risk-averse farmer is unaffected. Our results show that policymakers should carefully consider how social interactions in rural communities affect individual and group risk preference and whether social interactions also affect the participation and effectiveness of development programs.     

Technical progress and induced innovation in China: a variable profit function approach

Journal of Productivity Analysis - We propose a new methodology to estimate empirically the input price-induced technical change and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in China. Our primary...     

Production and hedging under correlated price and background risks

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This paper examines the competitive firm that has to make its production and hedging decisions under correlated price and background risks. The background risk...     

Residence after retirement: A review and bibliometric analysis

This study reviews the literature on the residence after retirement via Systematic Literature Network Analysis, which consists of the systematic literature review and bibliometric network analysis. There are three research questions, including (1) what the most recent studies are on the residence after retirement, (2) Who the most significant authors, documents, and sources are in residence after retirement, and (3) whether the extant research structure could guide the future agenda for the residence after retirement. Based on the systematic literature review, this study extracts 50 publications from the Scopus database by keyword, document type, source type, publication period, language, and subject area relevant to the residence after retirement. This study analyzes data employing Nvivo, VOSviewer, and SciMAX. The clusters of authors, countries, keywords, documents, and sources linked with relevant studies on the residence after retirement are according to the co-authorship (1) author, (2) country/territory, (3) keyword, and (4) document. Skitmore, M., Xia, B., Buys, I., Hu, X., Hu, Y., and Chen, Q. who the most influential authors are in residence after retirement. The themes of aging, continuing care retirement community, retirement village, and their associated keywords contribute to future research on the residence after retirement.